Sarah's Apple Pie

The Red Neck Chef uses some recipes that go back over 100 years. Great-grandma Sarah was married to the son of a Civil War veteran. I saw some pictures of her in her youth and she was hot. Sarah liked to take a nip of homemade spirits every once in a while. She made lye soap in the barn, churned butter in the oak’s shade, made candles in the smokehouse, raised vegetables in a garden that is still used today, and rung a couple thousand chickens’ necks in her day. Old Sarah has been talking to me since I got her cookbook a few months ago. I have been making the recipes that she probably made for her family in the late 1800s-early 1900s, like meat loaf, chicken and dumplings, homemade bread, etc. Of course, I cannot find lard anymore, and pure butter is hard to come by. But the recipe below shows some of the simple magic that you cannot find on the Food Channel. This recipe also shows why old Sarah got a wider waistline during her later years.


Ingredients:
6 large apples of your choice…The Red Neck Chef likes Granny Smith apples for Granny Sarah’s apple pies

1/2 cup of shortening

1 and a half cups of Flour

1 cup Sugar or Splenda

Butter

1/4 cup water

1/2 teaspoon salt

dash of nutmeg or cinnamon
This is a double-crust pie…that means that you will have the bottom crust and a layer of pastry on top of the pie itself. Pour the flour and salt into the mixing bowl. Stir it up a little with a mixer. Buy the shortening that is in separately-wrapped bars. Cut the shortening into little pieces. As the mixer is mixing, put a piece or two of shortening into the flour. Do this until all of the shortening is in the flour and it looks like flour with little pebbles in it. While the mixer is on, slowly put in the water. The pastry mix will clump up into a ball. That is good.

Take out the ball and separate into two equal balls. Roll out one ball on a floured board until it is about one-eighth of an inch and close to a circle. If the pastry flakes off onto your rolling pin, it is too dry so you have grab your pastry and work a little more water into it. Beware…if you work the pastry too much, you will have created one more shingle to put on your roof. Once you have a flat, round pastry that fits into your pie pan and up its sides and over the lip, roll out the other ball in the same way.

Peel your apples and cut them into slices. Place the slices in a paper bag. Add the sugar, nutmeg or cinnamon, and a tablespoon of flour. Shake it up and pour the bag’s contents into the pastry-lined pie pan. Cut pieces of butter and place into the apples. Put the top crust on top of it all. Make the edges nice and pretty. Get a knife and put a few cuts into the top pastry to allow steam to escape. Place in an oven preheated to 425 degrees F and bake for 45 minutes or until the crust begins to turn brown. Take out the pie and place on a cooling rack for twenty minutes.

Cut you a piece, putting a dab of vanilla ice cream on it with a shot of hazelnut liqueur on it. Enjoy the pie while remembering old Sarah sweating over a butter churn, taking a nip of something naughty, and her chickens cowering in fear.