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Cranberry Mixture
2 cups cranberries chopped moderately. 1/2 cup raisins seeded and chopped. 1½ cups sugar. 1/3 cup water.
Few grains salt. 1 tablespoon butter.
PROCESS: Mix ingredients in the order given (except butter). Cook until soft, stirring constantly. Add butter, chill mixture. Use for pie with one crust and decorate, when baked, with pastry cut in fancy shapes and baked on a tin sheet, or use for filling tarts. Supplementary Recipes Including recipes for a few cakes for special occasions, a variety of cookies suitable for use at any time, together with a selection of breakfast cakes, muffins, rolls, etc., that would not usually come within the compass of a dinner menu. 1/2 cup Cottolene.
A cranberry-raisin filling meant for a single-crust pie or small tarts. The text runs on into stray lines from the book's supplementary chapter — ignore everything from "Supplementary Recipes" onward, including the half cup of Cottolene, which belongs to the Bride's Cake that follows.
- YieldTwo cups of raw cranberries with the raisins and sugar cooks down to a thick filling — enough for one 8- or 9-inch single-crust pie, or a batch of small tarts.
- Chop, don't purée"Chopped moderately" means coarse; a food processor pulsed three or four times is right. Fully puréed berries give a sauce that will not hold a slice.
- Water is deliberately scantA third of a cup looks too little, but cranberries are mostly water and will release plenty. Stir constantly over medium heat as the recipe says, or the sugar scorches before the fruit breaks down.
- Cooking timeAbout 8 to 12 minutes. The berries pop, the raisins plump, and the mixture mounds on the spoon. Stop there — cooked further, the pectin and sugar set up hard and the filling turns candy-like on cooling.
- The butter goes in off the heatThe butter goes in last -- The recipe adds it after the cooking is done. It rounds the acidity and gives the filling gloss.
- "Few grains salt"A small pinch, less than 1/8 teaspoon. With 1½ cups sugar against very tart fruit, even that little tells.
- Chill before fillingThe recipe says to chill the mixture; a cold, set filling is less likely to soak the crust.
- Baking the shell and cutoutsBaking the cutouts -- The recipe gives no oven temperature. The decorative pastry shapes are baked separately on a tin sheet and added afterwards; the wording leaves it unclear whether the filled shell itself is baked first.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company to promote Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening sold as a cheaper, more digestible alternative to lard — which is why the word turns up in the stray lines at the end of this page and in the book's pastry recipes. The cranberry filling itself belongs to a long American habit of pairing the native bog berry with raisins and sugar for pies. Cranberries keep for weeks in a cold cellar without processing, which made them one of the few genuinely fresh fruits available to a northern household at midwinter, and the raisins here supply body and sweetness that the berries alone cannot. The decorated single crust — cutouts baked separately and laid over the chilled filling — reflects the era's fondness for making an economical pie look like an occasion.