Cherry Pie
Pick over, stem and pit cherries (there should be two cups when pitted). Heat to boiling point in their own juice, then chill them. Line a perforated pie pan with Rich Paste, moisten the rim with cold water and lay around a strip of pastry one inch wide, press lightly. Brush the pastry over with slightly beaten white of egg. Sweeten cherries to taste, add a few grains of salt and turn into lined pie pan. Sift over two tablespoons flour, moisten rim and cover with top crust, flute the edges and bake in hot oven for the first ten minutes, then reduce heat, continue baking for twenty-five minutes. Serve hot with cheese, cut in strips one-fourth inch thick and wide by two and one-half inches long.
A straightforward two-crust cherry pie with two period touches worth keeping: the egg-white seal on the bottom crust and the cheese served alongside. A few of the instructions assume equipment and habits that need translating.
- The hinge: seal the bottom crustBrushing the lined shell with lightly beaten egg white is meant to set into a thin film during the first blast of heat, helping to keep cherry juice from soaking the pastry. Do it just before filling. It works alongside the recipe's other defences: the perforated pan, the pre-boiled and chilled fruit, and the flour sifted over the filling.
- Oven temperatures"Hot oven" in a book of this era means 425-450F. Reduce to about 350-375F for the remaining twenty-five minutes. Total baking time of thirty-five minutes is on the short side by modern standards; bake until the juices bubble thickly through the vents, which may take closer to fifty minutes.
- Perforated pie panA tin pan pierced with small holes in the base, sold to promote a crisp bottom crust. A dark metal pan or a glass plate set on a preheated baking sheet or baking steel does the same job.
- Rich PasteThe book's own pastry recipe, a short crust richer in fat than a plain paste; the recipe as printed here does not say what fat it uses. Any good double-crust pie dough, chilled well, substitutes directly. You need enough for a bottom, a top and the one-inch rim strip.
- The rim stripLaying a one-inch band of pastry around the moistened rim before the top crust goes on gives the edge enough thickness to flute and seal properly. It is a structural step, not decoration.
- Cherries and sugarTwo cups pitted is roughly a pound of whole fruit. "Sweeten to taste" assumes sour cherries: expect three-quarters to one cup of sugar for sour, and as little as a third for sweet dark cherries. Taste the chilled fruit before deciding.
- ThickeningTwo tablespoons of flour is modest for fruit that has already been brought to a boil and released its juice. If the cherries look wet after chilling, drain some liquid off or raise the flour to three tablespoons; cornstarch or tapioca gives a clearer set.
- Cut ventsThe recipe never says to, but a sealed top crust over boiling fruit will split where it chooses. Cut steam vents before baking.
- Yield and the cheeseThe recipe gives no pan size; two cups of pitted fruit suits a small pie, eight to nine inches, cutting into six servings. The cheese is unspecified: cut whatever firm cheese you use into the batons as directed and lay them beside the hot slice rather than on it.
Pie with cheese is an old Northern habit, generally traced to the apple-pie-and-Cheddar custom of New England and the English North Country, and here it is extended to cherries. The perforated pie pan and the egg-white glaze both fit the domestic-science cookery of the turn of the twentieth century, when cooking-school writing was increasingly concerned with why a bottom crust fails. Precooking the fruit and chilling it before filling follows the same logic: driving off the first rush of juice in a pan means less of it inside the pastry. The instruction to sweeten "to taste" suits fruit whose sourness varied from tree to tree and week to week, for which no fixed sugar figure would serve.