Raisin Pie
1½ cups seeded raisins cut in halves. 1/2 cup sugar. 2 tablespoons butter.
Juice and grated rind 1 lemon. 2 tablespoons flour. 1 cup water in which raisins were cooked.
Few grains salt.
PROCESS: Cook raisins in boiling water to cover, until tender, drain, and mix with sugar, grated rind, flour and salt. Cool slightly. Turn into pie-pan lined with Plain Paste, dot over with butter and pour over water. Cover with top crust made of Rich Paste and bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven.
A pantry pie from the tail end of winter, built on dried fruit and a lemon. It works, but the original leaves two things unsaid: where the lemon juice goes and how thin the filling starts out.
- The lemon juiceIt is listed among the ingredients and then never mentioned again in the method. Add it with the sugar and rind, before the mixture goes into the shell.
- "Seeded raisins"At the time this meant raisins that had had their seeds removed by hand or machine, as distinct from seedless varieties. Any modern seedless raisin does the job; the halving is to help them plump and to spread them evenly.
- A moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350F; the book gives no temperature. At that heat a wet double-crust pie may well take longer than thirty minutes to set and colour the bottom -- allow 45 to 55 minutes, or start hotter for the first quarter-hour to set the base and drop back for the rest.
- Plain paste and rich pasteTwo pastries from elsewhere in the book: plain paste is a lower-fat, sturdier dough for the bottom, rich paste a shorter, butterier one for the lid. A single all-butter pie dough for both crusts is a fair substitute, though the base will be more fragile.
- The thickeningTwo tablespoons of flour against a cup of cooking liquid gives a loose, syrupy filling that sets only on cooling. Sprinkling the flour with the sugar over the drained raisins, as written, coats the fruit so that it disperses when the hot water is poured over.
- Pouring the water overThe liquid goes in last, into an already filled shell. Have the pan on the oven rack or a baking sheet before you pour, and cut generous vents in the top crust or the steam will lift it.
- YieldEnough for one standard pie pan, probably around six slices. Cool well before cutting; served warm it will run.
Raisin pie belongs to the season this chapter sits in -- March, when cellar apples are spent, nothing new is in the ground, and the only fruit in the house is dried. Pies of boiled raisins sharpened with lemon appear in American cookery through the nineteenth century, and among Pennsylvania German households the version known as rosina pie acquired the nickname "funeral pie," traditionally explained by the fact that its ingredients kept on the shelf and a pie could be produced at short notice for mourners. Elizabeth Condit and Jessie Long's book is arranged as a year of Sunday menus, and the placement here is the whole argument for the dish: a sweet course assembled entirely from staples, at the point in the calendar when that is all there is.