"Apple Pie recipe from mid-1850s: Take fine juicy acid apples; pare, core and cut them into small pieces. Have ready a deep dish that has been lined with paste (crust). Fill it with the apples; strewing among them layers of brown sugar, and adding the rind of a lemon pared thin, and also the juice squeezed in, or some essence of lemon. Put on another sheet of paste as a lid; close the edges well, and notch them. Bake the pie in a moderate oven, about three quarters of an hour. Eat it with cream and sugar, or with cold boiled custard.

"If the pie is made of early green apples, they should first be stewed with a very little water, and then plenty of sugar stirred in while they are hot.

"What is called sweet apples are entirely unfit for cooking, as they become tough and tasteless; and it is almost impossible to get them sufficiently done.

"When you put stewed apples into baked shells, grate nutmeg over the top. You many cover them with cream whipped to a stiff froth, and heaped on them."