A Tale of Two Turnovers

Turnover number one


Turnover number two

Finally, I made a recipe from the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook: apple turnovers. If you have read the book, you'll remember that Laura's husband, Almanzo, had delicious apple turnovers in his lunch pail everyday. Mother Wilder was an excellent cook and baker and the Farmer Boy book is practically all about the food the Wilder family cooked and ate.

So, I decided to try my hand at apple turnovers. I made one major modification to the recipe: I used butter instead of lard. We didn't have any lard in the house and I typically use butter in my crust. I made the dough by hand (instead of the food processor) and only with butter, flour, salt and ice water as prescribed. My traditional pate brisee recipe has a bit of sugar in it but that would have been extravagant for the time as white sugar was more expensive and harder to come by. The dough was not sweet as a result.


I peeled and chopped the apples and added brown sugar and cinnamon. The dough was rolled out and the apples placed in the center.


Here's where it got tricky. The recipe recommended too much filling and I struggled with getting adequate filling inside and a completely tight seal. I confess, I had some leaks. I also added a few dots of butter to the filling to help with the yum factor.


In the spirit of the book, I made one turnover according to the recipe, with a simple crust.


The pioneer recipe recommends dusting the turnovers with powdered sugar and you can see that greatly improved the visual appeal and flavor.

Then I made another turnover using a few of my own tricks: an egg wash, a few decorative leaves, and a sprinkling of white sugar. Being a lover of decorative pie crusts, I thought the egg wash and whitesugar topping was also very pretty on my second turnover.


And I had enough leftovers to scrap together an apple tart with a bit of lemon curd.

So, how did they taste? Pretty good! They didn't have as many "brown, spicy juices" as Mother Wilder's but they were very tasty and I could easily imagine these in a lunch pail. I also have a greater respect for baking during that time. Imagining the availability of ingredients that we take for granted like white sugar and apples, the challenge of using a woodburning stove instead of an oven, and doing everything by hand without Kitchen Aid mixers or Cuisinart food processors, these women truly were accomplished and dedicated cooks and bakers and I applaud them.