No apples for your pie? No problem
It fascinated me when I was a child in the 1960s. Carefully studying the back of the Ritz Crackers box, I asked my mother, “What are mock apples?”
I’d heard of red apples, yellow apples, crab apples, which you didn’t eat. But I had no idea what a “mock apple” was.
I honestly can’t recall my mother’s response, but I do recall a lingering feeling of “I don’t get it.”
So when Ritz Crackers announced that the brand was having its 75th birthday and offered up the recipe for its iconic Mock Apple Pie, I was intrigued anew. My feeling of “I don’t get it,” had given way to “I have finally got to try this for myself.”
I discovered that a lot of my contemporaries had the same curiosity. They had seen it on the cracker box or heard their mothers and grandmothers tell tales of it, but had never attempted to make it.
I even had a discussion with one cohort similar to the one I had with my mother as a child, trying to explain why the word apple was in the name of a pie that contained no apples. He had the same I-don’t-get-it look.
If you’re not familiar with it, the Ritz Mock Apple Pie is a combination of lemon-flavored sugar syrup and crumbled Ritz Crackers, topped with cinnamon and baked into a pastry crust.
What this pie lacks in apples, it makes up for in American history, science and psychology.
Ritz Crackers debuted in 1934, and not long after, the recipe for Ritz Mock Apple Pie began appearing on the box. It was there through much of the 1960s, and last appeared in 1993.
A spokeswoman for Ritz said the pie became popular during the Depression because apples were hard to come by and crackers were used as a substitute.
I wondered how easy it was for those Depression-era cooks to get two cups of sugar and a lemon in the 1930s, but the crackers made sense. Soda crackers and other biscuits had been substituting for apples and other fruit in pie long before the 1930s.
There were many times in the American past, particularly pioneer days, when apples were hard, if not impossible, to come by if they weren’t in season.
A California woman who blogs as the Crazy Pie Lady posted on her site a letter from 1858, in which the writer, Sue Smith of Henderson, Texas, details how to make a pie with crumbled biscuits, sugar, water and tartaric acid (cream of tartar).
The 1863 “Confederate Receipt Book, a Compilation of Over One Hundred Receipts, Adapted to the Times,” which is part of the rare-book collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, contains this recipe for Apple Pie Without Apples: “To one small bowl of crackers, that have been soaked until no hard parts remain, add one teaspoonful of tartaric acid, sweeten to your taste, add some butter, and a very little nutmeg.”
It’s easy to see how the buttery flavor of a Ritz could be marketed for use in Mock Apple Pie over soda crackers or saltines.
So with 150 years of American culinary history behind me, I set out to make a mockery of an apple pie. It was easy. Boil sugar syrup with cream of tartar. Add lemon zest and juice. Once it cools, pour it over crackers crumbled into a pie crust, top with cinnamon, dot with butter and bake. I watched this mash of soggy crackers bake into a beautiful, bubbling pie. It sure looked like an apple pie. Thanks to the cinnamon, it smelled like one, too.
Ritz Mock Apple Pie
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 3/4 cups water
Pastry for 2-crust 9-inch pie
36 Ritz crackers, coarsely broken (about 1 3/4 cups)
Zest and 2 tablespoons juice from 1 lemon
2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Mix sugar and cream of tartar in medium saucepan. Gradually stir in water. Bring to boil on high heat; simmer on low 15 minutes. Stir in zest and juice; cool 30 minutes.
Heat oven to 425 degrees. Roll out half of pastry on lightly floured surface to 11-inch circle; place in 9-inch pie plate. Place cracker crumbs in crust. Pour sugar syrup over crumbs; top with butter and cinnamon.
Roll remaining pastry to 10-inch circle; place over pie. Seal and flute edge. Cut slits in top crust to permit steam to escape. Place on parchment-covered baking sheet. Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until golden brown. Cool.
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