The regional table / Washington
Washington Apple Pie
Washington grows more apples than anywhere else in the country and almost none of its paperwork is about eating them. The grade standard measures colour, the extension bulletins measure cost per acre, and the one Washington document that rates apples for cooking is a railway advertisement from 1913 — which already said the state's most famous apple was not much good in a pie.
The document is Apple Talk: Recipes for 55 Ways to Serve the Apple, published by C. C. Hutchins at White Salmon, Washington, in 1913, printed in Portland by the Chausse-Prudhomme Co. and paid for, by the look of its front matter, by the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway, which lists the fruit districts along its line — Goldendale, Kennewick, Lyle, Stevenson, Underwood, White Salmon — before it lists a single recipe. It is a sales pamphlet and it does not pretend otherwise: sixteen varieties "are the ones which the Northwest produces in a higher state of perfection than any other district in the world". But in the middle of the boosting there is a table that nobody writes any more, because it costs money to print. The second column rates each apple for eating. The third rates it, separately, for cooking. Gravenstein, Spitzenberg, Ortley and Newtown Pippin are Excellent in both. Jonathan, Winesap, Wagener and Rome Beauty are Excellent or Very good to eat and only Good to cook. McIntosh Red and Grimes Golden are Excellent to eat and Fair to cook. And so is the Delicious, origin given as Iowa, flavour given as "mild, slightly sweet": Excellent to eat, Fair to cook. That verdict was in print in Washington in 1913, and the state planted the apple anyway, in quantities that made it famous.
It planted it because the rest of the record is not about cooking at all. The federal grade standard, 7 CFR part 51, subpart B, sets a colour requirement for twelve varieties and only twelve: U.S. Extra Fancy Red Delicious must carry good solid red over 66 percent of its surface, Fancy over 40, No. 1 over 25, and "All apple varieties other than those appearing in table 1 of this section shall have no color requirements pertaining to these grades." Ripeness in the same subpart is a ladder down from Hard through Firm and Firm ripe to Ripe, which the standard defines as "apples with mealy flesh and soon to become soft for the variety" — mealiness is the end of the scale, not a baking trait. Turn to subpart C, the grade for apples going to a factory, and the colour table vanishes: a processing apple is U.S. No. 1 if its defects will not "cause a loss of more than 5 percent, by weight, of the apple". For an apple that will be looked at, the government measures red. For an apple that will be cooked, it measures waste. The scale this serves is in the Supreme Court record: in Hunt v. Washington State Apple Advertising Commission, 432 U.S. 333 (1977), the Court opened with the finding that "Washington State is the Nation's largest producer of apples, its crops accounting for approximately 30% of all apples grown domestically and nearly half of all apples shipped in closed containers in interstate commerce." Half the boxed apples in America came out of one state, and what the boxes were graded on was how they looked when they arrived.
Why this version works
Cornstarch, not flour. Both will thicken this, but flour needs more of itself to do the same work and clouds the syrup to an opaque beige while it does it. Cornstarch at three tablespoons for this much fruit sets clear and amber, and it reaches full thickening power at a rolling boil, which is exactly the signal you are already waiting for. The corollary is that the pie is not done when the crust is brown. It is done when thick juice is bubbling slowly at the centre vent, not just round the rim.
Sour first, sweet second. An apple that tastes balanced raw tastes flat with three-quarters of a cup of sugar on it, and the acid is also doing structural work: it slows the pectin breakdown that turns slices into sauce. The numbers are easy to find because Washington State University had to publish them to patent its own apple. US patent application 2013/0227750 P1, "Apple tree named 'WA 38'", filed 23 February 2012 by Bruce H. Barritt and assigned to the Washington State University Research Foundation — the apple sold as Cosmic Crisp, grown from a cross of Enterprise and Honeycrisp in a greenhouse at Wenatchee — prints a maturity table in which WA 38 sampled on 5 October carries 0.62 g of titratable acid per 100 ml against Honeycrisp's 0.30 g on the same date. That is twice the acid, and it is the difference between an apple you want in a pie and one you want in a lunchbox.
Cooling is the last cooking step. Cornstarch gel sets as it falls below about 60°C, and a pie cut hot runs because the starch has not finished, not because there was too little of it. Four hours on a rack is the real figure, and the pie will still be faintly warm at the end of it. This is the single instruction most often ignored and it accounts for most soupy apple pies.
The juice comes out before the pie goes together. Apples are about four-fifths water and sugar pulls it out of them within the hour. Do that in a bowl and you can measure the problem: half a litre or more of liquid that would otherwise boil out inside a sealed crust, lift the lid off the fruit and leave the famous gap. Draining it, boiling it down to a scant half cup of syrup and pouring it back puts the flavour in and leaves the water out. The slices then collapse by roughly the volume of the juice they lost rather than the volume of the water they were still carrying, which is why a macerated filling sits tight against its lid and an unmacerated one does not.