mock apple pie

This past week, I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything. In “Pies from Paradise,” he writes a little about Mock Apple Pie, a recipe formerly featured on the back of the Ritz Crackers box that makes an apple-y tasting dessert without using any apples. The idea of an apple-less apple pie intrigued me to such a degree that I decided to try it out. I didn’t want to waste an enormous amount of ingredients, so I divided the recipe in half and made it in a small baking dish.

The developers of the recipe realized that the apples in apple pie do not impart much flavor and that the prominent taste is from the cinnamon and lemon juice. The Ritz Crackers, then, replace the apples: when baked, they absorb sugar syrup and become soft and mushy, like baked apples. And the aforementioned cinnamon and lemon juice give the dessert its apple pie flavor.

Steingarten was generally impressed by the Mock Apple Pie's ability to deceive, but I was not so convinced. While the cinnamon and lemon juice did remind me somewhat of apple pie, the Ritz Crackers were hardly apple-like in texture. Oh well. It was a fun little experiment, nonetheless.