Big Chunk Fresh Apple Pie

Well boys and girls, it's Pi Day today, no Mr Spellcheck not Pie Day, Pi as in 3.14, dig? Like how it's the 14th day of the 3rd month? Get it? Yeah and it was also Mother's Day, and Einstein's birthday and all that kind of stuff, but who cares.
I could have spent the day watching Pi the film and measuring circles, but decided to do something almost as challenging, namely deciphering the most elaborate pie recipe ever, instead.
Shirley O'Corriher is a scientist turned cookbook author who explains the chemical reasons why your sauce won't thicken, your roast chicken won't brown and your souffle flops, I was drawn to this book when a website reviewer promised that this was my path to faultless dishes. When I finally received the thing I was a little disappointed by the frankly, old fashioned grandma's selection of dishes offered and the insanely lengthy complicated processeses. This apple pie recipe, for example, comfortably spans almost four pages, and that's just the filling (the suggested crust is another three). But if you know me at all, you'll know that this is just the kind of masochism I relish, oh yeah baby, it hurts so good.
Look how many ingredients there are! I've made apple pie before, but that was just apples sugar and water - idiot, this one boast two different kids of sugar and suggests a mix of four different kinds of nuts (I could only muster two).
Overall the recipe is fairly straightforward in a pedantic kind of way. My hand still hurts from peeling and coring 10 apples, quartering, cutting each quarter into three slices, and chopping them in half. This is the kind of recipe that separates the maniacs from the rest of us, or us maniacs from the rest of them, halfway through I had a vision of smashing each apple with a hammer instead. But the biggest problem I had was with the whole US/Metric measurements thing. I hate the idea of measuring ingredients in cups. I know there's a standardized cup size American cooks use, but I think that's ridiculously inefficient. Some websites offer to convert cups to grams, but since, for example, a cup of Uranium is bound to weigh more than a cup of feathers, this would hardly work with something as precise as baking is meant to be. And FYI, swearing and cursing did not solve the problem like I thought it would. In the end I converted everything to tablespoons.
So, 24 (yeah TWENTY FOUR!) tablespoons of sugar go in, stir stir stir, mix mix mix and voila!
Result: I made a very simple unsweetened shortcrust pastry to temper the anticipated sweetness which did not come. This pie is amazingly delicious. It's rich without being too dense or heavy, the flavours of apple cinnamon and nutmeg are suspended in a thick nutty jelly (maybe too nutty, or maybe not). There's a slight Christmas mincemeat look and feel to this filling, but with a far more pleasing taste and texture. I guess I'm not that hot on describing taste, but lets just say I'm reclassifying this recipe from grandma's old hat to classic.