Currant Pie
2½ cups cleaned currants. 2 cups sugar. ⅛ teaspoon salt. 2 eggs slightly beaten. 2 tablespoons flour.
PROCESS: Mix the ingredients in the order given. Turn in a lined pie pan, heaping currants in center; cover with top crust, press and flute the edges. Bake as other berry pies. Serve hot. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.
A plain two-crust berry pie from the June chapter, built on fresh red currants at their short season. Two details need translating: what "currants" means here, and what "bake as other berry pies" meant to a 1913 cook.
- Fresh currants, not driedThese are fresh red currants on the stem, stripped and rinsed — "cleaned" means stemmed. They are not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle, which would make an entirely different and far sweeter pie.
- The sugar is not excessiveTwo cups of sugar to two and a half cups of fruit looks steep until you taste a raw red currant. They are among the most acidic soft fruits in the garden, and take far more sugar than most pie fruit — though this ratio is still sweeter than a modern currant pie would usually be made.
- The salt is notA full teaspoon of salt in a pie filling is high by current practice; a quarter teaspoon does the job of sharpening the fruit. The original quantity is what it is, but it is worth cutting.
- ThickeningTwo tablespoons of flour plus two eggs is a light set — the eggs are doing as much work as the flour, and the result is closer to a soft custard-bound fruit than a firm sliceable filling. Expect it to run a little when cut hot, as directed.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature, and "bake as other berry pies" assumes a cook who already knew her own oven. A modern equivalent that works: a hot start of about 425°F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then 350°F for another 30 to 35 minutes, until the juices bubble thickly. The recipe mentions only pressing and fluting the edges, but cut steam vents in the top crust — the eggs will puff it otherwise.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe says only "a lined pie pan"; the quantities suit a 9-inch plate, giving six to eight servings. The book assumes you have pastry for a double crust already made.
- FinishingPowdered sugar sifted over a hot pie will melt and largely disappear. Let the pie stand ten minutes before dusting if you want the sugar to show.
52 Sunday Dinners is arranged as a menu for each Sunday of the year, grouped through the seasons, and currant pie falls in June with the red currant season in the northern United States — a matter of a few weeks in early summer, after which the fresh fruit is gone until the following year. Currant bushes were a common dooryard planting in nineteenth-century America, valued as much for jelly as for pie, and a cook working from this book may well have picked the fruit rather than bought it. That domestic ubiquity did not last: Ribes species host white pine blister rust, and from the 1910s onward federal and state restrictions and eradication programs pulled currant and gooseberry bushes out of large parts of the country, which is generally credited with the fruit's near-disappearance from American kitchens. Restrictions have since been relaxed in many states, and fresh currants have crept back into farmers' markets, but a recipe like this one records a time when they were simply an ordinary June fruit.