The Challenge: Easy as pie--an easy dish and/or a pie.
The Recipe: Little girl's pie from Miss Beecher's Domestic Receipt Book
The Date/Year and Region: 1846 (5th edition 1856), New York
How Did You Make It: I peeled, cored, and quartered four medium apples, arranged them in my smallest pie plate, and then added 4 oz of molasses, 3 generous tablespoons of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of flour. I then prepared a half-batch of family pie paste (from Sarah Hale's The Lady's New Book of Cookery, 1852) using 1/2 lb flour, 1/4 lb butter and a little water. I covered the apples with pie crust, and baked it 325F for 90 minutes
Time to Complete: About 30 minutes to prepare, and 90 to bake.
Total Cost: Made with ingredients I had on hand.
How Successful Was It?: Ehhh... Molasses and fruit pies just aren't good things for me to make. It turned out slightly better than the cherry pie (and I spilled no scalding hot molasses on myself this time), but it still mostly just tastes like molasses. The filling was also really runny after baking, so I apparently should have used more flour.
How Accurate Is It?: Fairly. I used a modern variety of apple. Lacking a soup plate, I used my smallest pie tin, as the closest available equivalent.
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| Little Girl's Pie (1846/1856). Not quite to my taste. |
I am not big on molasses myself. But it looks lovely! :)
ReplyDeleteI like molasses, just not as the only flavor. ;) At least I didn't spill this one all over myself while it was cooling.
ReplyDeleteHmm. I'm not sure molasses flavored apples is a very good filling at all. I don't think you have to take the blame here. How was the crust?
ReplyDeleteI thought the crust worked fine, but I also have a very low standard for pie crusts... (at home, we used Crisco and tended to overwork them).
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