Apple Pie Is Not Always for Your Enemies

 

Every now and then, M. reverts to her New England roots and serves apple pie for breakfast  (The white stuff is yoghurt.)

I like it, but now it reminds me a visit a few years back to the Salem (Mass.) Athenaeum.  They had an exhibit on historical food-writing, and — in a humorous and ironic way — were giving out cards printed with Mark Twain's description of traditional New England apple pie:

To make this excellent breakfast dish, proceed as follows: Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct bullet-proof dough. Work this into the form of a disk, with the edges turned up some three-fourths of an inch. Toughen and kiln-dry it a couple of days in a mild but unvarying temperature. Construct a cover for this redoubt in the same way and of the same material. Fill with stewed dried apples; aggravate with cloves, lemon peel, and slabs of citron; add two portions of New Orleans sugar, then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies. Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.

For all that he lived some years in Connecticut, Twain's preference was always for Southern cooking.