In Chicago’s pastry history, apple slices are a nearly forgotten favorite

Growing up in the Chicago area in the 1990s, Theresa Flanagan remembers visiting her grandparents and eating one of their favorite desserts: apple slices.

The pastry — gooey apple filling between layers of dough, topped with a sugary glaze — is basically a slab pie that’s sold by the square or in a pan.

Apple slices used to be a Chicago staple. Now, the somewhat obscure dessert is still sold only at a few bakeries.

Flanagan recently came across a recipe for “Chicago-style apple slices” on Pinterest.

“As soon as I saw the picture, all these memories of childhood came flooding back,” she says.

She asked her husband and a friend whether they remembered apple slices. Neither had heard of the dessert.

To find out more about the pastry’s origins, its Chicago connection and its long-ago popularity, we spoke with a baker and scoured old newspaper stories. Here’s what we found.

Dobra Bielinski has run Delightful Pastries on the far Northwest Side for nearly 25 years. When she took over the business in the late 1990s, apple slices were still on the menu.

Bielinski, who is of Polish descent, says many European groups have some form of an apple dessert. But apple slices — and cherry slices, too — are a quintessentially Midwestern American thing.

“We have lots of apples in the Midwest,” she says. “Basically, apple slices are a way for the bakery to make money instead of making individual pies.”

Bielinski says the heyday of apple slices was in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1945, an article in the Chicago Tribune by its food editor described how to make apple slices, including a recipe that called for thin sheets of dough filled with apple mixture. That was the first mention we could find of a dessert that fit the description of the pastry Flanagan remembers.

A 1957 newspaper story told of Eleanor “Sis” Daley making apple slices for her husband, Mayor Richard J. Daley, calling the dish his favorite.

For decades, these treats were staples at bake sales, the recipes often printed in church cookbooks.

By the early 2000s, though, Bielinski says only a few customers at Delightful Pastries were ordering apple slices. So she took it off the menu.

Today, you can still find the dessert at a few bakeries, including House of Cakes in Norwood Park and Iversen’s in Blue Island.

“I would say it’s a nostalgic food item,” Bielinski says.

Flanagan recently tried an apple slice for the first time in decades and was flooded with memories. She says the dessert is one way for her kids, who’ve spent time with their great-grandfather, to feel closer to that generation.

Apple slices “are just familiar and comforting,” she says. “We can connect to the past.”