New England Apple Dowdy (1920)

A cook who wrote as if she were talking

Wilson's title page places her at Mrs. Wilson's Cooking School in Philadelphia and describes her as Queen Victoria's former cuisinière, a domestic science instructor at the University of Virginia summer school and an instructor of cooking for the U.S. Navy. Those are the book's own credentials for its author.

Her preface explains that the heavy cookbook style is not used and that the recipes are set out as if the housewife and the author were talking over the dish together. You can hear that voice in the dowdy, where two short ingredient lists are set into sentences that start before them and carry on afterward, much as a teacher talks a class through a dish. The same book is the source of our Chicken à la King, which is written in the same conversational way.

Wilson's measures for fruit, flour and sugar

The fruit is measured by the pint, a unit that looks old-fashioned until you read Wilson's own table of equivalents, where two cups make one pint. Her two pints of prepared fruit are therefore four cups of thin slices, and the USDA's figure of about 110 grams for a cup of peeled apple slices puts that at roughly a pound.

She was firm about measuring. Elsewhere in the book she asks for level measurements and for flour sifted once before it goes into the cup, so both portions of flour here are sifted first. Her dry-measure table counts two and three-quarter cups of brown sugar to the pound, which suggests a lightly filled cup rather than the firmly packed cup most modern recipes assume, and that is why the sugar is spooned in and leveled.

A moderate oven, pinned down

The recipe asks only for a moderate oven and forty-five minutes. Wilson's chapter on oven temperature defines moderate as 350 to 375°F, while her pie pages call 300 to 350°F moderate, and modern apple pandowdies with raw fruit under pastry run roughly 375 to 425°F. This version bakes at 375°F for 45 to 50 minutes, the top of her range and the low end of theirs. Her routine for holding that heat on a gas range, with the burners lit first and then turned down, gets its own explanation in our look at slow, moderate and hot ovens.

A pastry with baking powder

The dowdy page calls simply for a crust, and its sibling recipe, the plain apple dowdy printed just before it, names plain pastry. Wilson's version, which she titles The Real Secret, is unusual to modern eyes because it includes baking powder. Her reason for handling it as little as possible is simple: as she puts it, "The minute you knead or squeeze pastry that is the moment you make it tough." Her batch makes four crusts, so this recipe uses a quarter of it.