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The regional table / Vermont

Vermont Cheddar-Crusted Apple Pie

Published September 23, 2026 · Vermont

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The Vermont Department of Agriculture printed its own apple pie in 1915. It calls for lard, flour, salt, three or four good sour apples and maple sugar, baked in a moderate oven. There is no cheese in it, and no top crust either.

Cheese with apple pie is one of those habits that gets asserted so often it stops being checked, so I went and checked it. It is real and it is old. A paragraph reprinted in the Savannah Morning News of 15 October 1883, page two, picked up from a Lowell, Massachusetts paper whose name the scan garbles, runs: there is in Lowell a gentleman claiming to be both an epicure and a poet, who says that eating apple pie without cheese is like kissing a girl without a squeeze. Two years earlier, on 9 September 1881, the Columbus Daily Times printed a week of bills of fare for housekeepers who have to set a table three times a day, and Sunday dinner is cold roast lamb, potatoes, cold slaw, apple pie and cheese, melons. Not a Vermont paper in either case — these are syndicated scraps travelling the country — but the joke is set in Lowell and the practice was ordinary enough by 1881 to appear in a menu without comment.

What I could not find is a Vermont document that puts the two together. Bulletin No. 21 of the Vermont Department of Agriculture, March 1915, How Vermont Maple Sugar Is Made, prints a recipe headed Maple Apple Pie: lard, flour and salt rubbed together with just enough cold water to work it lightly, and the bulletin is firm that the less you work pie crust the better it is, just enough to get it into shape; then pared and sliced sour apples on the rolled crust with maple sugar over them, baked in a moderate oven. Single crust, no cheese, no spice. The 1899 Dewey Cook Book from Montpelier has cheese straws, macaroni and cheese and a cheese fondue, and no cheese anywhere near a pie. So the cheese belongs to New England and the maple belongs to Vermont, and this recipe puts them in the same dish on that basis rather than on a legend.

Why this version works

Sour apples, held in two sizes. The bulletin says good sour apples and means it — a sweet apple with maple sugar and cheddar is three sweetnesses and no edge. Slicing two-thirds thin and one-third thick gives you a filling where part collapses into sauce and part still has bite, which is the difference between a pie and a bowl of apple purée in pastry.

The cheddar goes into the pastry, not onto the plate. A cold slice laid on hot pie sweats and slides. Grated into the flour it does the work of part of the fat — cheddar is at minimum 50 percent milkfat by weight of the solids under 21 CFR 133.113 — so the crust stays short, browns in orange freckles, and delivers the salt in every bite rather than in one.

Maple sugar rather than white, at the 1915 proportion. Maple sugar melts into the apple juice and thickens it slightly as it goes, and it browns at the edges where the filling touches the crust. Vermont's own bulletin uses it straight, with no cinnamon, no nutmeg and no lemon. Restraint there is deliberate: spice and sharp cheese fight, and one of them always loses.

Two-year cheddar, because the flavour is a product of time. Bulletin 62 of USDA's Bureau of Animal Industry, 1904, L. A. Rogers on the relation of bacteria to the flavours of cheddar, makes the point that ripening is not simply the development of desirable flavours: those are the final result of a long series of complex changes which must take place before the tough, indigestible curd becomes edible. A mild block has not had them yet. Age is also what gives you the sharpness that survives being baked inside a sweet pie.

Ingredient notes

Apples: three pounds of firm tart fruit before peeling — Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening, Granny Smith, or a mix. Weigh them; apples vary enormously and a pound out either way changes the bake.

Cheddar: six ounces of extra-sharp, aged at least two years, grated on the large holes and returned to the fridge until the moment it goes in. If it is made from raw milk it has by law been cured at not less than 35°F for at least 60 days, which 21 CFR 133.113 requires and which is the reason raw-milk cheddar is legal at all. Pre-shredded cheese is cut with anti-caking starch and will make the pastry gritty.

Maple sugar: half a cup, granulated. If you cannot get it, use two-thirds of a cup of Grade A Amber maple syrup and raise the cornstarch to three tablespoons, because syrup is about a third water by law and the filling will run without it.

Butter and flour: 14 tablespoons of cold unsalted butter to two and a half cups of flour. That is less fat than a plain pastry takes, because the cheese brings its own. The 1915 bulletin uses lard and so can you, in which case drop to 12 tablespoons.

Step by step

  1. Make the cheese pastry. Whisk the flour and salt. Cut in the cold butter until the largest pieces are the size of peas. Toss through the grated cheddar. Add ice water a tablespoon at a time until the dough just holds when squeezed — usually 5 to 7. Divide in two, press into discs, chill at least an hour.
  2. Cut the apples in two thicknesses. Peel and core. Slice two-thirds of them an eighth of an inch thick and the rest a generous quarter inch. Toss everything with the maple sugar, cornstarch, salt and lemon juice and leave it 20 minutes so the juice draws.
  3. Roll and line. Heat the oven to 425°F with a heavy baking sheet on the middle shelf. Roll the first disc to 12 inches and line a 9-inch plate, letting the overhang stand. Cheese pastry tears more readily than plain — patch it and carry on.
  4. Fill and lid. Pile the apples in with their juices, doming the middle. Roll the second disc, lay it over, trim to a half-inch overhang, fold under and crimp. Cut four vents. Brush with cream and give it a thin dusting of maple sugar.
  5. Bake hot, then moderate. Onto the hot sheet at 425°F for 20 minutes, then down to 375°F for 40 to 50 minutes more, until the vents are bubbling thickly rather than thinly and the underside of the plate is brown when you tip it. Tent the rim with foil if it colours early.
  6. Cool properly. Three hours on a rack, minimum. A pie cut hot runs, and the cheese fat in the pastry needs the time to set back up.
A soggy base is the failure this pie is prone to, because cheese pastry holds moisture and apples release a lot of it. The preheated sheet under the plate is the prevention; the cure, if you have already cut into it, is to return the whole pie to a 400°F oven directly on the sheet for 12 minutes, which crisps the bottom without cooking the apples further. If the crust cracked and the filling boiled out over the rim, it was rolled too thin or filled too hot — scrape the burnt sugar off the plate while it is still warm, because it comes off in one sheet then and never afterwards.

Storage and make-ahead

Four days at room temperature under a cloth rather than in the fridge, which turns cheese pastry waxy. Refresh a slice at 350°F for 10 minutes.

It freezes better unbaked than baked: assemble, freeze solid on the plate, wrap, and bake from frozen at 425°F for 25 minutes then 375°F for an hour.

What to serve with it

Cold milk, which is the other thing New England has always put next to apple pie, and which suits a salty crust better than cream does.

If you want the cheese twice, put a wedge of the same cheddar on the plate as well. Vermont made apple pie its State Pie in 1999 — 1 V.S.A. § 512 reads, in full, that the State Pie shall be apple pie, and the much-quoted passage about a good-faith effort to serve it with cold milk or a half-ounce slice of cheddar is not in the codified section.

From the recipe box / Vermont

Vermont Cheddar-Crusted Apple Pie

Six ounces of two-year cheddar grated into the pastry instead of laid on the plate beside it, over sour apples sweetened with maple sugar the way the state's own 1915 bulletin does it.

Prep
40 min
Cook
1 hr 10 min
Total
5 hr
Serves
8
Calories
530 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. Rub the cold butter into the flour and salt to pea size, toss through the grated cheddar, and bring together with 5–7 tablespoons ice water. Chill 1 hour in two discs.
  2. Slice two-thirds of the apples ⅛ inch and the rest ¼ inch. Toss with maple sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice and salt; stand 20 minutes.
  3. Heat the oven to 425°F with a baking sheet inside. Roll one disc and line a 9-inch pie plate.
  4. Fill with the apples and their juices, lid with the second disc, crimp, cut four vents, brush with cream and dust with maple sugar.
  5. Bake on the hot sheet 20 minutes at 425°F, then 40–50 minutes at 375°F until the vents bubble thickly.
  6. Cool on a rack at least 3 hours before cutting.

Nutrition

Fat27 g (16 g saturated)
Sodium430 mg
Protein10 g
Serving1 slice, one-eighth of a 9-inch pie
Calories530
Cholesterol75 mg
Carbohydrates62 g (24 g sugar, 3 g fiber)

Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as a courtesy, not as dietary advice.

Questions readers ask

Can I use a milder cheddar?

It will disappear. The fat will still shorten the pastry but the flavour will not survive 70 minutes in the oven inside a sweet filling. If mild is all you have, raise it to eight ounces and cut the butter to 12 tablespoons.

Maple sugar or maple syrup?

Sugar, if you can get it — Vermont was making seven million pounds of it a year in 1914 and it is still sold. Syrup works at two-thirds of a cup with the cornstarch raised to three tablespoons, because the federal standard puts finished syrup at not less than 66 Brix, which means a third of what you are adding is water.

Why is there no cinnamon in it?

Because the 1915 Vermont recipe has none, and because aged cheddar and cinnamon both want the front of your palate. Add a quarter teaspoon if you must, but taste it against a plain one first.

Is cheese with apple pie actually a New England thing, or a myth?

Documented, and earlier than most people guess. The joke about apple pie without cheese being like a kiss without a squeeze is in print by 1883 attributed to a man in Lowell, Massachusetts, and a printed week of menus from 1881 lists apple pie and cheese as a Sunday dinner course with no explanation attached. What I could not find in any Vermont document I could reach is the two of them named together — Vermont's own 1915 state bulletin prints an apple pie with maple sugar and no cheese at all.