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Mock Cherry Pie
Mix one and one-half cups cranberries chopped moderately, three-fourths cup seeded and shredded raisins, one cup sugar, one tablespoon flour and a sprinkle of salt. Pile this mixture in a pie pan lined with Plain Paste. Dot over with one tablespoon butter. Add two tablespoons orange juice. Cover with Rich Paste and bake as other pies.
A cranberry-and-raisin pie that stands in for cherries out of season. The original assumes you already have two pastry recipes elsewhere in the book and know what "bake as other pies" means.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no temperature; "bake as other pies" assumed you knew the book's other pie directions. For a modern oven, a double-crust fruit pie can be started at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then dropped to 350F for another 30-35 minutes, until the filling bubbles thickly through the vents.
- Plain Paste and Rich PasteTwo pastry recipes given elsewhere in the book; the names imply a plainer crust for the bottom and a richer one for the lid. Any all-butter double-crust pastry does the job; use the sturdier half underneath.
- Pie pan sizePeriod pie pans ran roughly 8 to 9 inches and were shallow. This quantity of filling is modest by modern standards and will look thin in a deep dish pan.
- Chopping the cranberries"Chopped moderately" means halved or roughly cut, not pureed. Whole berries burst and flood the crust; pulverized ones turn to jam. A few pulses in a food processor is enough.
- ThickeningOne tablespoon of flour is light for this much fruit. Cranberries are high in pectin and set reasonably well on their own, but the pie will slice more cleanly if it cools completely to room temperature before cutting.
- SugarOne cup to one and a half cups of cranberries reads sweet, but raw cranberries are genuinely sour and the raisins are the only other sweetness. Taste the mixture before filling and adjust rather than assuming it is over-sugared.
- Raisins"Seeded" means the seeds removed, not seedless as a variety; modern seedless raisins need only shredding, which here means chopping them coarsely so they distribute.
- YieldOne pie, six to eight servings.
Mock dishes were a staple of American cookery long before this book: mock turtle soup, mock oyster, mock apple pie made from crackers. They belong to a tradition of using cheap or seasonal ingredients to imitate something expensive or out of season, and they were treated as legitimate cooking rather than as a joke. Cherries are a summer fruit and cranberries an autumn one. The combination of chopped cranberry and raisin does read surprisingly like sour cherry, and mock cherry pie remained in circulation in New England and the upper Midwest into the twentieth century; it is sometimes said to have been called Cape Cod cherry pie after the cranberry-growing region.