Blueberry Pie
Line a deep, perforated pie tin with Plain Paste; brush over with white of egg slightly beaten. Fill with three cups blueberries mixed with one cup sugar, two tablespoons flour, one tablespoon butter cut in bits, one-eighth teaspoon salt, one tablespoon lemon juice. Wet edges, cover with crust, flute the rim and bake thirty-five minutes in a hot oven at first to set the crust, then reduce the heat and finish baking.
A compact double-crust fruit pie from a 1913 menu book, written for a cook who already knew the house pastry recipe. The instructions to be filled in are the oven numbers and the fact that the filling must actually bubble.
- Oven temperatures"a hot oven at first" corresponds to roughly 425-450F, reduced to about 350-375F for the remainder. The recipe does not say how long the first stage should run, only that it lasts long enough to set the crust before the berry juices soak in.
- Thirty-five minutes is a minimumA pie of three cups of berries usually needs 45-55 minutes total. Bake until the juices bubble thickly through the vents, not just until the crust is coloured; flour-thickened fruit juice only sets once it has boiled.
- Plain PasteThe book's basic pie pastry, roughly flour, fat and ice water in the usual proportions. Any standard double-crust recipe (about 2 1/2 cups flour) does the job.
- The perforated tinA pie tin punched with small holes in the base, sold to give a crisper bottom crust. A metal or glass plate on a preheated baking sheet or a stone achieves the same thing.
- Egg white washBrushing the bottom crust with lightly beaten white and letting it dry a minute is meant to form a seal against the juice, and helps keep the base from going soggy.
- ThickeningTwo tablespoons flour is on the light side for three cups of fruit, which suits berries meant to be spooned rather than sliced. For cleaner wedges use three tablespoons flour, or about one and a half tablespoons cornstarch.
- VentsThe original mentions none. Cut steam slits or the top crust will dome and split at the seam.
- Yield and servingThe recipe names only a deep tin, not a size; these quantities suit roughly a 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Cool at least two hours before cutting; hot blueberry filling is liquid.
52 Sunday Dinners (Elizabeth O. Hiller, 1913) was organised as a year of complete Sunday menus, so the pie appears inside a seasonal dinner menu rather than in a chapter of pies. Blueberries were still largely a wild-gathered crop at the time; the cultivated highbush blueberry is generally traced to the breeding work of Frederick Coville and Elizabeth White in New Jersey, their collaboration beginning around 1911 and the first cultivated crops coming later in the decade -- so a 1913 cook was most likely buying picked wild fruit. The recipe's small touches -- the egg-white seal, the perforated tin, the hot-then-moderate oven -- reflect the period's preoccupation with the underbaked bottom crust in ranges that were hard to hold steady.