The Viking always gives me a hard time about Labor Day. In America, unlike anywhere else in the world, we bookend summer with the two holiday weekends of Memorial Day and Labor Day. It’s all very neatly delineated: summer is over after the holiday weekend. That's it! It’s Tuesday, September 7, everybody out of the pool. Trade your white trousers for corduroys, put away the grill, close up the summer house. To those who did not grow up observing Labor Day, this exactitude of seasonal change (two weeks before the seasons technically change, no less) seems silly.
But the thing is, somehow fall always does manage to arrive right on cue. Yesterday morning on the way to the train station in East Hampton, it was 55 degrees, mist was rolling off the fields, and we stopped for three families of wild turkeys to cross the road. The light has changed. The air has become dry. The first apples, a half peck of Mackintoshes, arrived in this week's CSA box and I baked my first apple pie with them this weekend.
You probably know by now that I am not fond of New York summers. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I don't like the sultry heat, the purposelessness, and most of all the Manhattanite diaspora that seems to occur each June through August. But fall! -- poignent, elegant, fall -- is my favorite time of year. It's a time for making stews, watching the leaves change, and take bracing, bare-sleeved runs in the crisp mornings.
Maybe this is why the delineating line of Labor Day has so much significance to me, far more than turning the corner from one calendar year into another on December 31. New Years always seems arbitrary, a dividing line between snow and gloom and...more snow and gloom. But Labor Day marks the transition between summer insouciance and fall industriousness. It's the start of the harvest.
Today feels like the right time for reflection and resolutions. Here are some of mine:
-Go to bed by 11 PM, not 1 AM, on weeknights
-Learn to bake the perfect bread
-Drink more water and less coffee
-When people introduce themselves to me, attempt to remember their names
-Finally begin training for that half marathon that I’ve been threatening to do
-Write handwritten thank-you notes
-Learn to sharpen my own kitchen knives
As I mentioned earlier, this weekend I celebrated the start of fall with a homemade apple pie.
Given that my father grew up on an apple farm, I've eaten a lot of apple pies in my day. Apple crisps, buckles, crumbles, tarts, and galettes too, but mostly pies. My grandmother was almost never without one in the house, and while I know that her pie apple of choice was the Mutsu, somehow no one has been able to track down her recipe. It definitely did not pass down to my father: when he made pies for us as kids, he used storebought crust and a simple filling of apples, sugar, and a little cinnamon. Those pies tasted wonderful to me because they were made by dad, but by the time I was a teenager I started looking for my own version.
Over the past decade I've tried every recipe I could get my hands on, and the one I use now is a slightly adapted version of one that I originally found in Saveur. It is the best apple pie I have ever eaten. And yes, you DO need to make the crust from scratch.
Classic Apple Pie
Serves 8
For the crust:
2 1/2 cups flour, sifted
2 tbsp. sugar, plus more for sprinkling
1 tsp. kosher salt
18 tbsp. very cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 egg, lightly beaten
For the filling:
6 apples, preferably Mutsu, Bramley, or a mixture of Cortland and Granny Smith, peeled, cored, and cut into 1/4" pieces
3/4 cup sugar
3 tbsp. flour
2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. kosher salt
1/4 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. freshly ground ginger
1. To make the crust: Combine flour, sugar, and salt. Add butter and work with hands until the flour resembles coarse meal flecked with pea-size pieces of butter. Continue to mix with hands, sprinkling in a total of 6–8 tbsp. of ice water one tablespoon at a time, until the dough begins to hold together. Transfer dough to a lightly floured surface, divide in half, and form 2 dough balls. Flatten each dough ball slightly to make a disk. Wrap disks in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.
2. Heat oven to 425˚. Roll out each disk of dough on a lightly floured surface into 12" rounds. Fit 1 round of dough into a 9" pie plate.3. To make the filling: In a large bowl, combine apples, sugar, flour, vinegar, cinnamon, salt, ginger, and nutmeg. Transfer filling to the pie plate, brush edges of pastry with some of the egg, and top with remaining pastry round. Trim edges with a knife and crimp with your fingers. Brush top of pastry with remaining egg and sprinkle with a little sugar. Using a knife, make 4 slits in pastry top and poke with tines of a fork.
3. Transfer pie to oven and bake for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 350˚ and continue baking until crust is golden brown and a knife inserted into one of the slits slides easily through apples, about 40 minutes more. Transfer to a rack and let cool for 2 hours before serving.
No comments:
Post a Comment