Perfect Food No Matter How You Slice It

Picture in your mind's eye a perfect apple pie. Observe its swollen dome of blistered pastry hugging hunks of apple beneath the surface. Watch its lightly thickened juices, sweetened and spiced, drip from the slit where the pie was sliced. Savor its honey and its tang of tart fruit. Apple pie is perfect food.

Apple pie can be as humble as stewed fruit packed in pastry, or ostentatious, with gems of custard and nuts just visible between intricately woven ribbons of crust. Apple pie is as refined as a peel of sweet pastry lacquered with glaze and the slimmest slivers of apple imaginable. It is a tiny tartlet of apple parings radiating from the center like the petals of a rose. It is a child's fantasy of sugar-sodden fruit piled high under sweet cinnamon crumbs. It is a heartwarming wedge served before a fireplace with great slices of aged Cheddar.

Apple pies vary not only in form and flavoring, but also in the type of apple with which they are made. Tart green cooking apples are the traditional preference of most cooks. These hard, acidic apples are often too tart for eating out of hand, but they come to life when mixed with the sweeteners and spices used in making a pie. Apple varieties in this category would include pippins, greening apples and Granny Smiths when very firm and tart. Other apples that are good in pies include Cortland, Macoun, Gravenstein, Jonathan, Northern Spy, Golden Delicious and Winesap. Any of these varieties can be used in the following recipes with various results, but equal success.

In most of these recipes, the apples and the crust are partially cooked separately before the pie is assembled. This is for a number of reasons. Prebaking, or blind baking, a crust before it is filled helps to keep it crisp longer, especially if the filling is very moist or contains custard. Precooking the apples releases some of their moisture before they go into the pie, which also helps to preserve a crisp crust. In addition, because apples shrink when they cook, a pie made with precooked apples will be about the same height after baking as when it first went into the oven. A pie filled with raw apples will shrink by almost half during baking.

All of the following recipes are wonderful - it is impossible to choose a favorite. Save them and savor them all fall and winter.

APPLE WALNUT PIE

For the pastry:

7 ounces plain vanilla cookies, ground into crumbs

1 cup finely ground walnuts

2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon