A smokin’ autumn fruit pie: Apple pan dowdy lives up to its nameSubscriber Exclusive

I was rifling through my mother’s recipe box looking for something sweet to make for dessert this week, feeling tempted by autumnal gingerbread, pumpkin chiffon pie and Louisiana yam pie, when I came across an index card with my father’s distinctive all-caps handwriting. He’s a cartoonist and so his letters have a sort of cartoon-text curvature about them and you can easily imagine the letters spelling out “Bam!” or “Pow!” or “Meanwhile, back at the Bat Cave…”

So when I saw an unlined index card with Dad’s handwriting listing the ingredients for something called “apple pan dowdy,” I stopped and...