What Happens When a Medieval Spice Blend Meets an American Apple Pie?
- michel1492
- 9 hours ago
- 9 min read
An old American cookbook, a 14th-century Franconian flavor palette, and the apple pie that connected them
Sometimes food history begins with a manuscript. Sometimes it begins with an archaeological discovery, an old merchant account, or a recipe written hundreds of years ago. And sometimes it begins because there is a pie crust in the kitchen that needs to be used. That is how this story started.
I decided to make an apple pie using a recipe from an old edition of Joy of Cooking—a wonderfully recognizable American apple pie: sliced apples, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, butter, and pastry. Except I didn't quite make that pie. The pie shell I had on hand was a prepared crust that needed to be baked before it was filled, so rather than subject an already-baked crust to the recipe's much longer baking time, I made an open-faced pie instead and gave the apples a shorter, hotter trip through the oven.
Then I reached the spices. Instead of cinnamon and nutmeg, I reached for 14th c. Franconia German Sweet Blend, a seasoning I developed from my research into the spice palate of medieval German cooking. I used a full tablespoon. Twenty minutes later, at 420°F, I had an apple pie that tasted surprisingly different from the familiar cinnamon-forward pie I had expected. And that sent me looking backward about 675 years.
From an American Cookbook to Medieval Würzburg
The Joy of Cooking recipe called for six medium-sized apples. The apples sitting in my kitchen were large enough that two generously filled my 9-inch pie shell. That's a useful reminder about recipes themselves: "six apples" sounds like a measurement, but it really isn't variety and individual fruit size can make an enormous difference. I cooked by the pie in front of me. Two apples were enough.
But the more interesting departure was the seasoning. Franconia contains a much broader collection of aromatics than the cinnamon and nutmeg called for in the American recipe. Cinnamon is there, certainly, but it shares the stage with ginger, cardamom, cloves, coriander, nutmeg, black pepper, allspice, and orange peel. Once that mixture met the apples, something changed. The pie still tasted unmistakably of apple, but cinnamon was no longer responsible for telling the entire story; there was warmth, citrus, pepper, floral fragrance, and a lingering complexity that made each bite slightly different from the one before it.
That made me wonder: had I simply put a medieval-inspired spice blend into a modern American dessert? Or would a cook in 14th-century Franconia have recognized something about what I had done? Remarkably, we can ask them.
A Cookbook from Franconia, Around 1350
One of the most important surviving sources for medieval German cooking is Daz buoch von guoter spîse, generally translated as The Book of Good Food. The collection survives in the housebook associated with Michael de Leone and was compiled in Würzburg around 1350. It contains roughly one hundred culinary recipes and is generally regarded as the earliest surviving German-language collection of its kind.
Würzburg matters to our story because it lies in Franconia. We are therefore not searching vaguely across medieval Europe for an apple recipe that happens to support a modern idea we have a culinary source from the same region and century that inspired the Franconia seasoning. So I went looking through its recipes for apples. They were waiting for me.
Medieval Apples Didn't Have to Be Dessert
The apples in The Book of Good Food do not behave quite the way modern American cooks might expect. They appear in several different preparations: sour apples are peeled and incorporated into a mixture involving eggs, flour, and bread before being fried in fat or butter; apples are cooked until soft and combined with wine, fat, and eggs; and elsewhere they appear alongside ingredients that would seem decidedly savory to a modern baker.
That tells us something important about medieval cooking: an apple wasn't necessarily a dessert flavor; it was an ingredient. Our modern categories of sweet and savory can become a problem when we look backward. We expect apples to belong with sugar and cinnamon because generations of cooking have taught us that combination so thoroughly that it feels almost inevitable. It isn't. The medieval cook inherited a different set of expectations.
And then I found a recipe that brought my modern pie considerably closer to the medieval kitchen.
Apples, Spices, and Pastry
Among the recipes in the Würzburg collection is a fasting preparation described as a krapfen. The modern word can make us think of something doughnut-like, but that isn't particularly helpful here what matters is the construction. The medieval cook is instructed to crush nuts in a mortar and combine them with an equal quantity of diced apples. Then comes the particularly interesting instruction: the filling is to be mixed with spices. The manuscript does not give us a neat modern teaspoon-by-teaspoon spice formula; the cook has discretion. The apple, nut, and spice mixture goes into pastry and is baked.
Think about that for a moment: apples, spices, pastry, baking, Franconia, around 1350. Suddenly, the pie sitting on my kitchen counter didn't seem quite so disconnected from the medieval world.
But this is also where we need to be careful.
This Is Not a Medieval Apple Pie
My open-faced apple pie is not a reconstruction of a 14th-century Franconian recipe, and that distinction matters. I began with an American cookbook. I used a modern prepared pie shell. I sweetened sliced apples in a way familiar to a modern baker. And I baked the filling using a temperature and timing developed for the ingredients and crust sitting in my kitchen. Finding a medieval pastry containing apples, nuts, and spices does not magically transform my pie into a medieval recipe; historical cooking becomes unreliable very quickly when resemblance is turned into proof.
But the connection isn't imaginary either. A cook working in 14th-century Franconia knew cooked apples, knew pastry, and knew aromatic spices. And we have evidence from Würzburg around 1350 for putting apples, nuts, and spices together inside pastry and baking them. That is a much more interesting story than pretending someone in medieval Würzburg was baking the same apple pie we eat today. They weren't. What they had was a different flavor vocabulary.
Before the Apple Learned the Rules
Modern American cooking has taught us what "apple pie" is supposed to taste like. Cinnamon is usually the dominant spice, nutmeg often follows, clove or allspice might make an appearance, sugar softens the acidity of the fruit, and butter adds richness. Those combinations are so familiar that cinnamon alone can evoke apple pie even when there isn't an apple anywhere nearby.
But the apple doesn't know that. An apple doesn't know that cinnamon belongs with dessert and black pepper belongs at the dinner table; we taught it those rules. Or, more accurately, generations of cooks taught us those rules. A medieval Franconian cook approached the same fruit with a different collection of culinary assumptions. That is one of the reasons historical cookbooks are so valuable: they don't simply give us old recipes; they reveal combinations that previous generations considered perfectly ordinary and that we have subsequently forgotten.
What Franconia Does to an Apple
This is where my tablespoon of Franconia becomes interesting. Using that much seasoning wasn't a timid substitution for the cinnamon and nutmeg in the original recipe; it substantially changed the aromatic structure of the filling. Cinnamon remained familiar, but it stopped doing all the work. Ginger brought warmth, cardamom contributed fragrance, clove and nutmeg gave the apples depth, coriander introduced a subtle citrus-like quality, and orange peel reinforced that brightness.
And then there was black pepper. Pepper in apple pie may sound strange to a modern American cook, but used as one voice among many, it doesn't make the apples taste peppery it gives the sweetness an edge and makes the other aromatics seem more vivid. The result wasn't an apple pie trying to taste medieval. It was an apple pie allowed to taste more complicated. And it was delicious.
The Twenty-Minute Pie
There was still one problem: my crust was already baked. The Joy of Cooking recipe I started from was designed for a conventional double-crust pie and a considerably longer bake, and following those instructions with my prepared shell didn't make much sense. So I didn't. I filled the baked shell with the seasoned apples, dotted the surface with pieces of butter, left the top completely uncovered, and put it into a 420°F oven for 20 minutes. That was it.
The apples softened while retaining their shape. Their exposed edges browned and curled slightly. The butter melted through the fruit. The crust remained crisp rather than enduring another long baking. When the pie came out of the oven, it was rustic, open, and quite different from the apple pie I had originally intended to make. I tasted it. There is nothing I want to change.
Franconia Open-Faced Apple Pie
Yield: One 9-inch pie, about 6 to 8 servings Bake: 420°F for 20 minutes
This is a modern Oak City Spice Blends recipe inspired by a traditional American apple-pie formula and flavored through the lens of 14th-century Franconian cooking. It is not presented as a reconstructed medieval recipe.
Ingredients
1 pre-baked 9-inch pie shell
2 large apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
1/2 to 2/3 cup granulated or brown sugar, depending on the tartness of the apples (100–135 g)
1 tablespoon 14th c. Franconia German Sweet Blend (7–9 g)
1/8 teaspoon salt (1 g)
1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch, if the apples are particularly juicy (8–12 g)
1 1/2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces (21 g)
A note about the apples: Because two "large apples" can vary considerably in weight, I would weigh the prepared apples the next time this pie is made and add that measurement here. Until then, two large apples is the tested quantity, and I would rather publish that honestly than invent a gram weight.
Method
Preheat the oven to 420°F.
Place the sliced apples in a large bowl. Add the sugar, Franconia, salt, and cornstarch if needed. Toss gently until the apple slices are evenly coated.
Spoon the apples into the pre-baked pie shell, spreading them evenly without tightly compressing the fruit.
Dot the surface with the pieces of butter.
Bake uncovered for 20 minutes, until the apples are tender but retain their shape and the exposed edges have begun to brown.
Remove the pie from the oven and allow it to cool before slicing so the juices have time to settle.
Best With
Serve the pie slightly warm or at room temperature. It needs very little accompaniment because the expanded spice profile is part of what makes it interesting. If you do add something, keep it simple a spoonful of lightly whipped cream or a small scoop of vanilla ice cream gives contrast without covering the Franconia spices.
From Their Kitchen to Ours
The most interesting thing about this pie isn't that I managed to turn an American recipe into something "medieval." I didn't. It is what happened when two culinary worlds were allowed to meet without pretending they were the same.
Around 1350, a cookbook compiled in Würzburg recorded cooks working with apples in ways that don't always fit our modern expectations. Among those recipes was a baked pastry filled with apples, nuts, and spices. More than six centuries later, an American cookbook gave me another way of putting apples into pastry. And standing between those two kitchens was a seasoning inspired by the older one.
That is the part of food history that continues to fascinate me. History doesn't have to remain behind museum glass. It doesn't have to remain untranslated on a manuscript page. And historical cooking doesn't require us to pretend that everything we make today existed exactly as we make it hundreds of years ago. Sometimes the more interesting thing is simply to ask: what did they know about flavor that we have forgotten? Then take that question into the kitchen.
In this case, I found part of the answer in two apples, a tablespoon of spice, and twenty minutes in the oven. And it tasted like apple pie. Just not quite the apple pie I thought I knew.
Through the Kitchen Window
A recipe survives because somebody thought it was worth recording. When an anonymous cook or compiler in 14th-century Würzburg preserved instructions for combining apples, nuts, spices, and pastry, there was no way to know that someone more than six centuries later would read those words while thinking about another apple pie sitting on another kitchen table. That distance is part of the wonder.
We don't have to cook exactly as they did to learn from them. Sometimes we simply have to open the old book, pay attention to what they put together, and be willing to let an ingredient behave differently than we expect. The apple hasn't changed nearly as much as we have. And perhaps that is why tasting the past can occasionally feel so familiar.
Further reading: the manuscript tradition of Daz buoch von guoter spîse and its association with Michael de Leone's Würzburg housebook can be explored through the scholarly Kallimachos Fachtexte database. Individual recipes, including the apple-and-nut pastry, are accessible through Fyndling with Middle High German text and modern interpretation.
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