The secrets of a British apple pie

‘As American as apple pie’, or so the saying goes. But what happens if the apple pie in question isn’t actually American?

America is the source of many of my most beloved vintage recipes, especially puddings, and particularly pies. But the knock-on effect is that sometimes they can overshadow similar dishes that come from other places. The British apple pie is not quite an underdog in this fight, but it’s certainly less celebrated than its cousin from across the pond.

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It took a while for apples to take hold in the US. Only crab apples were native to America, and they were small and sour – no good for baking with. The early colonists of Jamestown brought apple seeds and cuttings with them, but those seeds took a while to turn into trees, and when they did bear fruit, it was mainly used for cider.

The earliest apple pies come from England, with the first recorded recipe for the dish in the late 14th-century cookbook The Forme of Cury. Alongside apples, the recipe calls for figs, raisins, pears, good spices and saffron. It is enclosed in ‘cofyn’ or coffin pastry, which was really a cooking vessel and not designed to be eaten (you will be relieved to hear I am not recommending coffin pastry for our pie).

For me, one of the most distinctively British aspects of our apple pie is our preference for Bramley apples. The Bramley apple is a truly British phenomenon, cultivated almost exclusively here (a handful of niche farms can be found around the world). Come September, you can’t move for Bramley apples in the UK. Enormous, bulbous, acid green and dwarfing their eating apple cousins, they are extremely sharp when raw, but mellow when cooked into a tart sweetness, with a near-fluffy texture.

The earliest British apple pies would not, however, have been made from Bramleys. The first Bramley tree was grown by a young girl, Mary Ann Brailsford, in her garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, in 1809. Mary probably never saw the tree fruit, leaving the house to marry, and she died in 1852, before the Bramley took root in the British culinary landscape.

The tree she planted was included in the sale of the house, which was bought in 1846 by a butcher named Matthew Bramley.  Ten years later, Henry Merryweather, who owned a local nursery, took cuttings from the tree and grafted them on to rootstock to grow trees to sell. He named the apples they produced after Bramley the butcher. In 1900, violent storms caused the original tree to fall, but it survived and is still bearing fruit today, more than 200 years since it was planted.

In an apple pie, Bramley apples will soften, while still holding their shape – it is best to pile them up a little, so the cooked pie doesn’t dip in the middle as the apples collapse.

It’s not just the Bramley apple that defines the British apple pie, though – after all, in those early pies, Pippins were generally the preferred cultivar. We also take a different approach with the pastry, the spicing and the finish. Where America favours a thick, flaky pastry, often with a latticed top and sky-high chunks of eating apple, all tossed in cinnamon, our version is a little different.

We use shortcrust pastry, rolled thinly, undulating over the contours of the apples beneath, and then painted with egg white before caster sugar is scattered with wild abandon over the top. The warmth of cinnamon and nutmeg, cloves and mace are integral to a good apple pie, and I like the dance of the mixture of spices; autumn fruit can stand up to strong spicing.

When it comes to serving apple pie, I am both an equal opportunist and capricious. Thin, vanilla-rich crème anglaise, thick clotted cream, canary-yellow Bird’s custard, runny pouring cream, or just one perfect ball of ice cream – all call to me at one time or another.

Serves: 8
Hands-on time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 40 minutes, plus cooling

For the pastry

• 350g plain flour
• 200g butter, cold and cubed
• ½ tsp fine salt
• 1 egg white
• 2 tbsp caster sugar

For the pie

• 5 Bramley apples
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp mixed spice
• 3 tbsp light brown sugar

1. First, make the pastry. Mix flour and salt together in a large bowl, then rub the butter into the dry ingredients until it all resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add cold water a spoonful at a time, squeezing the mixture to bring it together into a dough; you shouldn’t need more than about three tablespoons of water, and may get away with less. Wrap the pastry in clingfilm and refrigerate for at least half an hour.
2. Peel and core the apples, chop them into chunks about an inch and a half wide, and toss them in the lemon juice in a bowl. Add the light brown sugar and spice and toss again.
3. Preheat the oven to 200°C. Divide the chilled pastry into two parts, roughly two-thirds and one-third. Roll out the larger piece and lay it into the bottom of a pie dish, with some overhang at the edge. Tumble the apple into the pie dish, and then roll out and lay the smaller piece of pastry on top, completely covering the apples.
4. Crimp the edges of the pastry, or trim them and press them together with the tines of a fork. Cut two slashes in the centre of the pie to act as steam vents. Paint the pastry with egg white, and scatter the caster sugar on top.
5. Bake for 30-40 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown, and then leave to sit for 15 minutes before serving.