Personally I eat my apple pie a la mode, but in 1893 the Medical times and register decreed
"Apple pie without the cheese, is like a kiss without the squeeze."
So with this amorous directive in mind I'm making a German recipe for apple and cheese pie from 1553.
So thank you to Trade coffee for sponsoring this video as we take a look at the history of apple pie,
this time on Tasting History.
Today's recipe comes from the 1553 German cookbook 'Das Kochbuch de Sabina Welserin'.
"To make an apple tart. Take apples, peel them and grate them, then fry them in fat.
Then add in as much grated cheese as apples, some ground cloves, a little ginger and cinnamon, two eggs.
Mix it all together. Then make a dough as for a flat cake, and add a little fattened to it so that it does not rise,
and from over and under, a little heat, let it bake."
Now I don't really know what the dough that she mentions is like because
the translation could actually refer to a number of different things.
But there is a contemporary 16th century recipe albeit from England for
"To make a short paste for tart.
Take fine flour into curtsy of fair water and a dish of sweet butter and a little saffron,
and the yolks of two eggs and make it thin and as tender as you may."
So I'll go ahead and use those instructions for our tart dough. So for this recipe what you'll need is:
5 medium apples. Now the type of apple that was used is pretty much up to you.
They had all sorts of different varieties in Germany at the time so I'm going with something on the sweeter side
because there is no sugar added to this dish and so you want something sweet.
3 cups or 340 grams of grated cheese.
I'm using Emmentaler cheese, it was available in Germany at the time and I like it and it's fairly mild,
but you can use pretty much whatever you want. Just stick with something on the more mild side,
and something hard and grateable.
2 eggs, 1/8 teaspoon of cloves, 3/4 of a teaspoon of ginger,
1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 3 tablespoons of butter or lard for frying, and a quarter teaspoon of salt.
So that's all that you need for the filling but for the crust you'll need:
2 cups or 240 grams of flour, 2 egg yolks, 6 tablespoons or 85 grams of butter,
a pinch of saffron soaked in a tablespoon of water, and a quarter cup or 60 milliliters of water.
So first make the dough.
Work the butter into the flour with your fingers, and then add the two egg yolks and the saffron and work that in.
Then slowly add the water but only as much as it takes to have the dough come together.
You may not need the whole quarter cup. Then cover the dough and let it rest for 30 minutes,
and while the dough rests go ahead and treat yourself to a nice cup of coffee, or at least that's what
I'm going to do courtesy of today's sponsor Trade.
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Oh and shipping is free. Now back to the dough.
Once the dough is rested turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and then roll it out.
This dough is wonderfully forgiving and easy to work with.
Once you've rolled the dough out line a tart or a pie dish with it,
and then while not completely necessary for this I do prefer to blind bake it just so I don't get a soggy bottom.
So line the crust with some aluminum foil and then add in baking beans,
and then set it in an oven at 425 degrees Fahrenheit, 220 Celsius, for 15 minutes.
Then take it out, remove the beans and foil, and bake it for another five minutes or until the base of the crust is completely dry,
and then let it cool. And while it cools you can go ahead and make your filling.
So peel your apples and grate them and then set a pan over medium heat and melt your butter or lard,
and then add in your apples and fry them for about 5 minutes.
The recipe is not particularly specific as to what you're looking for as you fry these apples.
I'm assuming that it's to reduce the amount of liquid that's going to go into the pie as well as to release some of those
more aromatic appley notes. You do want to make sure to keep moving the apples around the pan
as they fry just so they don't burn,
and then remove them from the heat and transfer them to a bowl,
and while they're still hot add in the cheese, the cloves, the ginger, the cinnamon,
and the egg and mix everything together. The cheese should start to melt so it'll help bind the mixture together.
Then spoon the mixture into the cooled crust, smooth the top,
then bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 175 Celsius for 45 to 50 minutes,
and you want to keep an eye on the crust. If it does start to darken a little bit faster than you want
just put a pie shield or some aluminum foil around the outside.
Now while this isn't the hardest recipe I've done on the show it's also not the easiest by any stretch,
and so I don't quite get that phrase it's easy as apple pie.
I can think of a lot of things that are easier than making this apple pie.
One of those things is making sure that you're subscribed to Tasting History by clicking the Subscribe button
and the notification bell so you never miss an episode.
And another thing that's also pretty much just as easy is to sit back relax and listen while I teach you about the history of apple pie.
As American as apple pie, that's how the saying goes but is it true because
the very first recipe that we have for something like apple pie comes from England in the year 1381,
and is for a tarts in apples. Take good apples and good spices, and figs, and raisins, and pears,
and when they are welly braid color with saffron well and do it in a coffin and do it forth to
bake. Well now this recipe is often credited as being written by Geoffrey Chaucer. It wasn't.
It actually comes from Deuce Manuscript 257 which was compiled around the same time and by the same
person who compiled 'The Fore of Cury' in the 18th century but regardless of where it comes from it's
really an interesting recipe. It calls for apples and pears, and figs and raisins. Though at this
time the term raisin could just mean grape, so we don't know if they're dried or actual grapes. In
French it still means grape. Also the texture is probably kind of weird because ebraid the wordy
braid means pounded in a mortar so it would have been made into almost like a sauce or a paste,
and that seems to be how they were done for quite some time because even in our 16th century recipe
while they're not mashed they're grated and so you get a more mushy pie than the pie that
we would eat today. And even when we do find a recipe that does call for sliced apples a 1514
dutch recipe for apple tertin once it's baked you open the pie and mash the cooked apples and then
add in cream it actually sounds really tasty, and and probably like a wonderful pudding but
still very different from how we would eat it today. It's not until the Elizabethan age that
we start to see recipes that spare the poor apple from the degradation of being sauced,
and perhaps it's that difference that allowed the apple pie to start receiving the media
attention that it so sorely deserved. In 1590 the English dramatist RobertGreene wrote a work that
complemented a lady by saying my breath is like the steam of apple pies, and I suppose that
if it was cold out and she had just had some like cinnamon or ginger to freshen her breath
then the comparison is apt, but let's take a moment and look at this picture of Robert Greene.
It's called suited in death's livery and it's him at work while wearing the death shroud that
he was buried in and I don't exactly know why that is. Maybe it's because he was still having works
published after his death kind of like Tupac, but it's just kind of weird and interesting and I love
it. Now while Green surely thought that the line about the lady's breath was meant as a compliment
if the lady in question was an avid reader of the contemporary herbalist John Gerrard then it might
have earned a green a slap in the face for Gerrard says the pulp of roasted apples mixed to a froth
in water and drunk by the court has benefited those with gonorrhea which gives a whole new
meaning to the phrase an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Now unfortunately for the venereal
health of those early English settlers in America there were no apples in the New World, not for
eating at least. They did have crab apples which were small and sour and mostly used for making
cider, but not for pie, but it wasn't long before good English apples and good English honeybees
made their way to our shores putting apple pie on American menus. The first mention was on October
1st 1697 by Samuel Sewell, most famous for being a judge in the Salem Witch Trials, and being one
of the few to show any regret after the fact, but in 1697 he was not persecuting young women
for witchcraft but picnicking on Hog Island where he had butter honey curds and cream for dinner,
very good roast lamb, turkey fowls, apple pie. So when I was 12 I had a very good fortune to visit
Japan with the choir that I sang with. And my mom said write a journal while you're there and so I
brought the journal and pretty much wrote down everything that i was eating which kind of irked
her because I think that that was pretty much all that I logged in there, but if Samuel Sewell one
of the great diarists in American history could track his food then I stand by my 12 year old food
log. Though my food log was nothing compared to the travelogue of 18th century Lutheran missionary
Israel Acrylius when he traveled from Sweden to the colony of New Sweden. In Delaware he wrote
apple pie is used throughout the whole year and when fresh apples are no longer to be had dried
ones are used. It is the evening meal of children house pie in country places is made of apples
neither peeled nor freed from their cores, and its crust is not broken if a wagon wheel goes over it.
Terrible review for a pie apple pies of New Sweden one star and with the reputation of American apple
pies dragged through the mud someone had to step up and Amelia Simmons was just the woman for the
job. In her 1796 cookbook 'American Cookery' she offers readers not one but two fantastic apple
pie recipes. Apple pie and buttered apple pie both recipes start getting suspiciously close
to a modern apple pie with the exception of the addition of rose water and a little story. When I
first started baking I wanted to make a rose apple pie. I found a contemporary recipe for it and
because I was a novice baker I did not really realize that there was a great difference between
rosewater and rose oil. There's a huge difference by the way, so I made this
apple pie- rose apple pie using a tablespoon of rose oil and while it was completely inedible
it did make the house smell like potpourri for about a month. So happy little accident you might
say and another happy little baking accident is how we get France's answer to the apple pie.
So the story goes that sometime in the 1880s there were two sisters, Stephanie and Caroline Tata,
and they owned a hotel in France. Well one of them was trying to bake an apple pie and she
was cooking the apples in butter and sugar on the stove and got distracted and it started to burn,
so she started to freak out and very quickly just took it off the heat, didn't remove the apples
from the pan instead just took the crust that she had the dough and threw it over the top and
put the whole thing in the oven. She let the crust bake and then took the whole thing out pan and all
and flipped it over so that the crust would be on the bottom thus making the tata. Now is that true?
Probably not something very similar had been made in the area for decades before the 1880s and its
cousin the upside down cake had been around since herrem but the story is still just lovely, but
it's French and any good American knows that apple pie ain't French, it's American. American as apple
pie but when that phrase started we don't exactly know. The earliest mention that I was able to find
comes from 1924 when the Gettysburg times touted new lust suits that are as American as apple pie
though I'm really hoping that the phrase had been around before that, and wasn't coined by
a clothing company but no matter the origin it is definitely true. We in America have embraced
the apple pie and in so many varieties. Apple cobbler, apple brown, betty apple crisp and the
wonderfully named trio apple pan dowdy apple grunt and apple slump which are typically made by lining
an iron pot with bread dough, and then filling it with apples and molasses before baking it.
But we are not without our apple pie missteps for while it may have been British sailors who first
came up with this dish it was American cookbooks that first wrote about the mock apple pie.
Soda biscuit and a half tea cup of water, tea cup of sugar, a lemon, then you crush this soda
cracker and add the other ingredients and then put it into a crust and bake it and somehow that
is supposed to mimic an apple pie. I don't quite see how it would mimic the taste or the texture
but I'm so curious so I'm probably gonna have to make it one of these days so be on the lookout,
but while the mock apple pie should probably be consigned to the dustbin of culinary history
its last big hurrah being in the 1930s when Ritz crackers did a marketing campaign
featuring a recipe for it. Real apple pie has truly become a symbol for American patriotism
for pie is the secret of our strength as a nation and foundation of our industrial supremacy.
Pie is the American synonym of prosperity, pie is the food of the heroic, no pie eating people
can be permanently vanquished. A little intense crazy even especially when you learned that this
passionate sentiment was a rebuttal to an English author claiming that one should not eat apple pie
more than twice a week, but the American-ness of apple pie stuck GIs heading off to fight in
World War II said that they were fighting for mom and apple pie. How do you argue with that?
Now I really like apple pie but clearly not as much as my grandfather's generation though maybe
this 16th century German apple and cheese pie will give me the kick in the pants that I need.
So you'll know when your apple pie is ready when the center is no longer liquidy but just
has a slight wobble. Then take it out and let it cool completely and here we are, an apple
pie from 1553. The texture kind of surprises me. I really thought that it was just going to kind
of fall apart but it really held together and I'm guessing that's because of all the cheese in there
especially when cooled, you know just kind of binds it together. So let's have a taste.
This is not at all what I expected. The texture is actually really nice.
It's soft and silky. It's not as dense as I thought because of all the cheese
it would be very dense. It's not at all. It's really, really nice
the flavor is just you know what it's it doesn't remind me of apple pie it reminds me of more like
a quiche again because of all the the cheese I guess you get the apple but because there's no
sugar, that's not the the flavor that really comes through it's it's very savory, it's like eating an
apple with cheese which is delicious but not what I think of when I think of apple pie. The spices
are there which give a hint of that kind of apple pie idea, and it really lifts the other flavors
but I want sugar. I would make this again but I would add probably like three quarters of a cup
of sugar. A lot of sugar. It's savory. It's like a quiche so if you are going to make this, you got
to be really careful with what cheese you choose. Get something very, very mild. I think that that's
very important otherwise it's just going to blow the apples out of the pie. For me I'm probably
gonna stick with regular old American apple pie a la mode which is French hmm. So make sure to use
my link in the description to get your first bag of Trade coffee for free. Make sure to follow me
on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I will see you next time on Tasting History.