Elisabeth's Grandmother's Dessert Pie

Fellow Dieter and Swede Elisabeth shared a Swedish wartime recipe for pie. She says about the recipe:

"It is passed on from my grandmother to my mother to me. Notice it has little sugar, but very much flour - they were farmers and had good access to flour, but not to the rationed sugar."

Here it is:

• 100 g sugar (a little more than 1 dl, 1dl sugar = 0,85 hg) 
• 200 g butter 
• 300 g flour (6 dl of flour - be sure to sweep of the excess, "strukna mått") 
• Fruit or berries

Mix it all into a paste (or dough) and use about a third to make a bottom crust. Bake in 150 °C until it has a nice golden coulor.

Fill crust with apples (or berrys, for example a mix of raspberry and blueberry), use remaining dough to make a top-crust. Bake in oven until smells tempting and the cover has a nice colour.

Elisabeth says she always adds sugar over the berries or apples, and then enjoys it with lots of custard-sauce. Well, I don't know about "lots of custard sauce" but custard powder wasn't rationed in Britain so if you could get it... I'll leave you to sort that out with your conscience!

Great grandmother Anna's Wartime Apple Cake

The recipe is a bit odd, because the actual cake contains neither butter nor eggs and only very little fat poured over it. The story behind it is that my great grandmother, who was a cook, supposedly made this up during the war. My mother used to make this all the time when I grew up, always taking care to feed me some stories about wartime rationing with it.

I call it “apple cake” rather than “apple pie” because the result is very much like a very moist, heavy sort of sponge cake. It doesn’t need custard or ice cream or cream and it tastes even better cold and doesn't get dry - it's still fine after a few days in the fridge. It yields a lot too, so it'd be very good for some sort of festive occasion, either with tea or coffee, or as a simple and rustic dessert.

2,5 dl sugar (1 cup)
6 dl flour (2.5 cups)
3 dl milk (1.3 cups)
5 teaspoons baking powder
5-8 apples (depending on size)
sugar, cinnamon
butter or margarine according to taste (I’d say about 100 g but the more the tastier - but obviously, you could get away with much less)

1. Peel and slice apples very thinly (remove the seeds and such first of course).
2. Mix sugar, flour and baking powder. Pour the milk a little at the time while stirring. Stir until smooth. It’s going to be not quite like dough, but a lot stickier than when you make ordinary sponge cake or muffins.
3. Prepare an oven-pan (a large one, I used one that was about 35×30 cm – about 11×14 inches) with butter and breadcrumbs. Pour the mixture into the dish.
4. Cover it with layer of apple slices.
5. Pour some sugar and cinnamon on them.
6. Put on another layer of apples. Add more sugar and cinnamon.
7. Finish by pouring the melted butter evenly over the cake.
8. Bake in 225 °C (450 °F) for app 20 min

*Sorry for the poor picture quality; it's an old photo