I was rifling through my mother’s recipe box looking for something sweet to make for dessert this week, feeling tempted by autumnal gingerbread, pumpkin chiffon pie and Louisiana yam pie, when I came across an index card with my father’s distinctive all-caps handwriting. He’s a cartoonist and so his letters have a sort of cartoon-text curvature about them and you can easily imagine the letters spelling out “Bam!” or “Pow!” or “Meanwhile, back at the Bat Cave…”
So when I saw an unlined index card with Dad’s handwriting listing the ingredients for something called “apple pan dowdy,” I stopped and pulled it out. The recipe is cryptically short, listing only six ingredients, plus the oven temperature and cooking time. There aren’t any measurements for the nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger, which made me feel a sudden kinship with my father, who cooks much the same way I do: by impulse, intuition, trial and error and occasional triumph. He’s as creative in front of a stove as he is in front of a drawing board. I suppose the apple pan dowdy’s instructions are missing because he figured that whoever was making the recipe could use their imagination to fill in the blanks. He obviously used creative license when spelling “cinnamon,” opting for an “e” in place of the “a.” Tsk, tsk.
I took Dad up on his implied dare and made this recipe. Was I up to the challenge? That depends on how you define tasty and how much you like molasses.
He lists the ingredients as “6 apples, 1 c molasses, nutmeg, cinnemon (sic), ginger, 1 pastr (where’s the “y,” Dad?) crust on top w/ holes, 400 degrees 1 hour.” That’s it. Do you peel and core the apples? I suppose so. Do you saute apples, molasses and spices in a cast-iron skillet, top it with a crust and then put the whole thing in the oven? I haven’t the faintest idea, but that’s how I interpreted the recipe, reckoning that “pan dowdy” means everything together in one pan in a homey sort of way.
I did some research and found I wasn’t far off the mark. Apple pan dowdy dates back to Colonial times, having traveled to America’s shores in the recipe books of English and Dutch transplants. The name “dowdy” is derived from the Middle English “doude,” meaning, in contemporary jargon, terminally uncool. It might be a reference to how inelegant the dessert appears — no fluted crust, no flourishes, just sweetened apples and buttery pastry. It’s rumored to have been the favorite dessert of Abigail Adams, wife of our country’s second president, John Adams, who was definitely homelier than a pan of cooked apples.