English as an Apple Pie

I made an apple pie!  I must say, I felt quite proud looking at my finished pie, with a crust made from scratch and everything.  It was actually quite simple!  I used an apple pie recipe from Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-wife, which closely aligns with our many English recipes despite its provenance, so this made a very English apple pie.  Yes, an English apple pie recipe.  Believe it or not, apple pies are not American.  They are all over our 17th and 18th-century English cookbooks, with a key difference: cloves instead of cinnamon.  Mary Randolph's recipe calls the cook to make a good crust, cut apples thin and lay them in layers with powdered sugar between each layer, then at the end to add in cloves and rose-water.  It smells divine.



The hardest part is the crust, if you're not used to making pie crusts.  For this one, I took about a pound and a half of flour to almost one-third pound of butter.  Simply rub the butter into the flour bit by bit with your hands until it feels grainy and looks a bit like sand.  Then I added in one egg to give it a bit of strength (it needs to stand on its own outside of the pie tin), and just a little water until it formed a dough (remember, you can always add more, you can't take any out).  Then grease your pie tin and flour it (so the pie will come out).  You can use any standard size, because with the amount of flour you used you'll have plenty of crust.  Lay in your crust, then do as I described above: pare, then cut apples thinly and lay them in layers with powdered sugar between each layer.  For my pie, once the apples reached the top, I put in about a spoonful of rosewater and some ground cloves.  Feel free to spice as you like, though, with cinnamon or nutmeg.

Then the part that makes it a pie: roll out a top-crust.  It's not a pie without a top-crust by 18th-century standards.  Once rolled, add decoration!  To make the decoration stand out, brush a little egg white over the top before you bake it-- I neglected that step... oops!  I baked mine in a Dutch Oven, but you can bake as you would a normal pie (again-- bake times and temperatures are hard for me to give you).  Then marvel at how pretty it looks and enjoy!