Henry Street Garden French Apple Pie

Each fall the DH and I spend a day in the country picking apples at one of the many orchards that dot the Hudson Valley. But not this year.  Instead, I harvested apples even more locally -- from a fruit-laden tree growing in the garden adjacent to Henry Street Settlement, my place of employ. For the first time in recent memory, the squirrels didn't destroy the crop.

To showcase these Granny Smith beauties, I made a French Apple Pie, which is basically an apple crumb pie.  Now, I've rarely had success with apple pies -- they are either too runny or too dry -- but this vintage recipe hit it out of the park.* The hand-typed recipe promised that "You will be delighted with the results." And I was.

Below is the apple tree, growing in Martin Luther King, Jr., Community Park, right next to the Settlement's headquarters. The park, a true sanctuary on the Lower East Side, was created from funds donated by the Louis and Anne Abrons Foundation to the Plant-A-Lot Project of GrowNYC.

Can you tell I'm the marketing director at Henry Street?

Get started by peeling and slicing the apples. Make easy work of this by enlisting the help of a family member, as I did. (Thanks, Paul.)

Combine the apples with flour, sugar and cinnamon.

Place the mixture in an unbaked pie crust. (Pie crust recipe at the end of this post.)

Prepare the crumb topping.

and place atop the apples.

Bake for just 45 minutes.

Cool, slice and enjoy!

Production notes: I followed the recipe exactly, but used a regular -- not a deep dish pie pan (because I don't own one). I used cinnamon (not nutmeg) and didn't add any water to the filling.

*Be sure to choose apples appropriate for pie, as some will not hold up when baked, making for a watery filling.

For the pie crust, I used my version of the tried and true recipe published in the original c. 1980 Silver Palate Cookbook, which is pretty vintage itself at this point. This makes a double crust, so you can cut it in half to make the single-crust required by French Apple Pie.

2 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 stick of cold butter, cut into small pieces
6 T. cold Crisco, cut into pieces
2 t. sugar
1 t. salt
3 - 6 T. cold water

Place dry ingredients in a food processor and whirl to blend.  Add butter and Crisco and process until it resembles cornmeal. Transfer to a round bowl, and add the water, a couple of tablespoons at a time.  Blend with a fork.  When it holds together, transfer to a lightly floured surface and form a large ball.  Divide in half and either roll out between two sheets of plastic wrap, or refrigerate until it's a bit firmer and then roll out.

How Not to Make a Peach Pie

You know that saying: Listen to your gut?  On Saturday, I didn't and ended up with a disappointing mess of a peach pie (though a night in the refrigerator somewhat improved things).

It all began at the farmer's market, where I purchased some gorgeous peaches intending to make a peach cobbler for that night's barbecue.  But after discovering that I had made (and written about) peach cobbler three times, decided to bake those beauties into a pie. I couldn't find a hand-written recipe in my collection, but I did find the next best thing: a clipped recipe from an old newspaper carefully glued to a recipe card.

The venture began well.  I dropped the peaches (in batches) into boiling water for a minute or two, so as to loosen their skins . . .

which slipped off easily after running the fruit under some cold water.

I sliced the peaches and

after coating them with sugar, flour, cinnamon and nutmeg, placed them in a pastry-lined pie pan.

And then, against every instinct I had, I followed the recipe and poured nearly one cup of cream mixed with a beaten egg over the peaches.  Pie bakers know that one adds thickener (flour, tapioca, cornstarch, etc.) to fruit pies to absorb the juices released from fruit -- and here this recipe called for adding liquid, and a lot of it! Can anyone say counter-intuitive?

The liquid poured out of the shell faster than I could contain it. You can see below just a bit of the mess it created.  I was too busy trying to stop the flood from reaching the floor to take more pictures, but you get the idea.

I couldn't serve the pie that night.  It was still very warm from the oven, so I quickly made chocolate chip cupcakes with milk chocolate frosting (subject of a future post).

Even after a night cooling on the counter, the pie was still quite liquid-y inside.  That didn't prevent me from eating quite a lot of it.  And it had firmed up nicely after a night in the fridge. Still...

Production notes:  Follow this recipe, but don't add any liquid!

Some of our barbecue guests holding the pie, which they didn't even get to sample.