Apple Pie
Do you remember your first English text-books? I’m not speaking about those glossy Oxford/Cambridge editions of A4 format which flood our modern bookstores, no. Only if such names as Shaverneva L.I., Bogoroditskaya V.N. , Khrustaleva L.V. or Happy English (the one with white lilies on the cover!) ring a bell, you’ll understand my warm feelings.
Yellowed pages, simple texts, plain pictures… they gave us first pieces of knowledge and were the guides of little children to completely another, foreign world. Sometimes these text-books contained culinary recipes, for example: how to prepare tea. Well, it’s quite clear: five-o’clock sacred British tradition, even if hardly existing any more… My memory evokes drawings of a pounchy teapot, teaspoons and a kettle with boiling water on the margins near the recipe. It was so easy to imagine a cozy scene: a table covered with a lacy cloth, all the family together around it, the aroma of freshly infused tea. “Would you like some milk or piece of lemon?”, “Pass me the sugar, please!” I guess it was supposed to train the imperative mood and polite questions on these recipes. If I were lucky to be one of the co-authors, I would definitely add another recipe - the one of an apple pie, considering that it matches tea so well.
Here it is:
INGRIDIENTS
A glass of flour
A glass of sugar
3 eggs
A pinch of soda on the tip of a knife (with a drop of apple vinegar added into it)
A small cube of butter
2 big apples
A pinch of vanillin
100 gr walnuts
First break 3 eggs into a bowl and mix them properly adding by small portions a glass of sugar. As a result you’ll have a thick foamy mass. Then in the same way proceed adding gradually the flour, and after it the soda with a drop of apple vinegar in it. The dough is now ready.
Next wash the apples (you don’t need to peel them), take out the core and seeds and slice the apples into pieces.
After that take a frying-pan (or it can be a clay bowl), grease with butter all the surface inside it and sprinkle it with just a very thin layer of flour (it will prevent the cake from burning).
Now put the apples in the frying pan. I usually arrange them upwards so that they pierce through all the texture of the pie. As soon as the apples are in, put the dough above. Then chop the walnuts and cover the dough.
It’s ready to be put into pre-heated oven. Cook for about 40 min at the temperature of about 170 °C.
Serve with semi sweet/dessert wine, coffee with amaretto or freshly infused tea (for the tea recipe please consult the text-books mentioned above).
