Dr Alvin Wood Chase’s 1871 Recipe for ‘Apple Pie Which is Digestible’

“Instead of mixing up your crust with water and lard, or butter, making it very rich, with shortening, as customary for apple pies:

Mix it up every way just as you would for biscuit, using sour milk and saleratus, with a little lard or butter only ; mix the dough quite stiff, roll out rather thin, lay it upon your tin, or plate ; and having ripe apples sliced or chopped nicely and laid on, rather thick, and sugar according to the acidity of the apples, then a top crust, and bake well, putting the egg upon the crusts, as mentioned in the “Pie Crust Glaze”, and you have got a pie that is fit to eat.

But when you make the rich crust, and cook the apples and put them, on it soaks the crust, which does not bake, and no stomach can digest it, whilst our way gives you a nice light crust, and does not take half the shortening of the other plan ; yet perhaps nothing is saved pecuniarily, as butter goes as finely with the biscuit-crust-pies, when hot, as it does with biscuit ; but the pie is digestible, and when it is cold, does not taste bad to cut it up on your plate, with plenty of sweetened cream.”

Alvin Wood Chase, Dr. Chase’s Recipes; Or, Information for Everybody (1864)

Nothing worse than an indigestible apple pie, I’m sure we can all agree. Doctor Chase‘s remedy for that dreadful circumstance seems to rely on reducing the fat content of the pastry, using ‘saleratus’ – which the Internets reliably informs me was a mineral leavener used in the U.S. in the nineteenth century – and sour milk (butter milk?) instead of the customary butter or lard.

Not being much a consumer of pastry, due to my several-times-aforementioned gluten-free affliction, I’m really not best-placed to assess this one – aside from suggesting that blind baking or pre-baking the pie crust didn’t seem to be a thing in Dr Chase’s day? – but if anyone out there knows a thing or two about a pie crust and would care to pass judgement, or predict a likely outcome to Dr C’s method, please feel free to do so, via the comments.