The challenge:  cook every cover recipe from the gazillion Bon Appetit magazines I have saved over the years. The idea struck me as I contemplated cooking the cover recipe of the September 2009 issue “Chicken a la Mattone” or Chicken under a Brick - I smiled inside at the thought of posting a recipe that uses  brick. Since it’s still September I scoured my collection looking for other September issues and, surprisingly, only found one.  So I actually do throw out some…

The issue was the September 1999: Special Millennium Edition and on the cover was apple pie. Inwardly I groaned because I am not a baker – in fact I have never baked a pie, actually I think I may have but it would have been over two decades ago.  Yes, it’s true, I’m aged (like a fine wine) enough to have been cooking for 20+ years!


I could have shirked from the challenge because you all would never know, but I’m not like that. So I read through the recipe, check to make sure I have all the ingredients, buy Crisco (eek) apples at PlowBoys, my current fave market, and – oh crap, I don’t own a pie pan – go to Target and buy a Pyrex glass pie dish.

Now, I never use Crisco, but I have heard that it does make the best pie crust… so putting aside the fact that it is made from partially hydrogenated oil; and everything we’ve learned about harmful trans fats (ignorance was bliss in 1999); I tackled the job of peeling all those apples.  This didn’t take as long as I thought it would – only about 10 minutes; coring and slicing them took a little longer.




I bet that you did not know that Crisco came out in 1911 and that early sales were largely  generated by Orthodox Jews.  The recipe for Five-Spice Apple Pie begins with this anecdote:


“By the time Crisco came out in 1911, apple pies had long been an American classic. But Crisco, the first hydrogenated vegetable shortening, gave cooks a boost.  Here was a shelf-stable alternative to perishable butter and lard. While a lot of consumers were skeptical of Crisco, many early sales were generated by Orthodox Jews,who bought the shortening after a recipe booklet was published in Yiddish showing how Crisco could be used without breaking kosher dietary laws.  Crisco’s success was assured when rationing made lard scarce during World War I.”   Bon Appetit, September, 1999

Five-Spice Apple Pie

CRUST: