Hello from NL 33. This is Bake Sense, the somewhat ordered record of ramblings that concern the world of baking, from championing flavour and wholesome ingredients to questioning where those ingredients come from and how we can make the most of them. Along the way, you’ll find recipes and insights from life in and out of the professional bakery and plenty of fruitful chat.
Good Things in England by Florence White is the sort of book that grounds you in the truth that we have not always been so lost and a drift from the regionality and localisation of food and its production. That domesticity in the kitchen, whilst challenging, was once more valued and brought tremendous pride. Indeed, it was the ambition of Florence to record the nuances of English cuisine to see that it did not become homogenised and lost alongside nations that were managing to ‘preserve the integrity of their own kitchen’ and that this would help improve our own cooking. The compendium-style collection of recipes was gathered from all regions of England, from home cooks who wished to share what they loved to cook for their families and professional cooks and chefs who were passionate about what they did for a living.
It’s no surprise that Apples feature with some frequency within the pages, providing rich pickings for the ardent apple adorer. From Dorset Apple Cake to Fritters, Butter and Pudding, but it is the English Apple Pie and its surrounding commentary that stirred up nostalgia in me and set me off on a mission to create my ideal version. A couple of years ago, I contributed the recipe to a new compendium of traditional British recipes, ‘The British Cook Book’ by Ben Mervis. With apples on my mind, now seems an appropriate time to revisit it.
No debate about it: good pie starts with good pastry, and unlike an American apple pie, which would strike out with flaky pastry, an English apple pie begins with a tender, buttery, sweet, shortcrust pastry. One that figure hugs the apple filling, a blanket that bakes to create an undulating golden crust, dimpled and sugar-dusted.
The filling should be plentiful and take up the entire internal pie cavity from upper crust to bottom crust. To ensure this, it calls for a pre-cooked preparation of apples, which I admit is a little more time-consuming than tossing raw slices with sugar, seasoning and starch but ultimately more reliable. It allows you to control apple slumping and shrinkage and provides an opportunity to build intense apple flavour.
Saving the peels and cores from the apples and cooking them in water to create an apple stock jelly is a technique borrowed from Florence’s book. A resourceful way to amplify all the apple notes whilst simultaneously extracting pectin, which lends structure and support to the deep filling.
Together, pastry and filling create what stands out in my mind as the most enjoyable feature of English Apple Pie: the thin seam that forms between filling and crust, where buttery all-butter pastry meets buttery apple filling, its soft, slightly cakey and damp in all the right ways. As thin as endothelium and ethereally delicious.
I’ll be talking more about pre-cooked pie fillings next Sunday when I join fellow flour enthusiast Helen for a workshop at her beautiful bakery, Eric’s, in East Dulwich. But for the love of pie, I’ve detailed all you need to know to make an English apple filling in the downloadable recipe below. It can be used with your favourite pastry, shortcrust, flaky or puff to create your ideal apple pie. And for subscribers to the Extra Credit portion of the newsletter, you’ll also find the recipe for my ultimately buttery sweet shortcrust pastry so you can indulge in the joys of a very English Apple Pie all of your own.