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Cherry Pie
1 quart ripe cherries, 1 yolk egg, 3 tablespoons cream, and 1/2 cup sugar. Wash cherries, stem and place in colander over dish to catch juice. Place thin layer of the following dough on shallow pan, sprinkle top with breadcrumbs. Spread stoned cherries over evenly. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Beat yolk well, add cream and cherry juice and pour over all. Bake in hot oven until well browned at bottom.
The dough is made as follows: 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/4 cup sugar and 1 egg. Mix dry ingredients. Work in Crisco with finger tips; add egg; mix. Toss on slightly floured board and roll a 1/4 inch thick. This makes enough dough for a large oblong pan.
This is a sheet-pan fruit tart rather than a double-crust pie: a thin sweet dough, a layer of cherries, and a splash of egg-and-cream custard poured over. A few of the instructions assume knowledge the original did not bother to spell out.
- The breadcrumbs are the hingeThey sit between dough and fruit to soak up the juice that cherries throw off in the oven. Skip them and the base stays wet no matter how long you bake it. A tablespoon or two of dry, fine crumbs across the surface is enough.
- Hot ovenRead that as roughly 400 to 425F. The dough is thin and the point is to set and brown the bottom quickly before the fruit floods it; allow something like 30 to 35 minutes, but go by the original's own test, which is literal -- lift an edge with a spatula and look underneath for browning.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and butter gives a better flavour, though it browns faster. One tablespoon of fat to a cup of flour is very lean; the egg does most of the binding, so expect a firm, biscuit-like dough rather than a flaky pastry.
- The dough will feel dryMixed by the letter, a cup of flour with one egg and one tablespoon of fat is barely cohesive. Add a teaspoon or two of cold water or cream if it will not come together, and press it into the pan with your fingers instead of fighting to roll it.
- CherriesA quart is roughly 1 1/2 lb whole, a little over a pound once stoned. Sour cherries were common for baking at this date and will need the full half cup of sugar; sweet cherries can take less.
- The reserved juiceDraining in a colander yields only a few tablespoons unless the fruit sits a while. Whatever collects goes into the yolk and cream — the custard is meant to be thin and to seep between the cherries, not to cover them like a clafoutis.
- Pan size"a large oblong pan" is not defined; something in the region of a 9 by 13 inch sheet with a shallow rim suits the method, though a cup of flour rolled 1/4 inch thick will not stretch that far, so expect a thinner layer or a smaller pan. Anything deeper and the fruit steams.
- YieldCut into squares, this serves eight to ten. It is best warm on the day it is baked; the crumb layer only holds the juice back for so long.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to the wave of cookbooks issued by manufacturers in the early twentieth century to teach cooks how to use a new product ydrogenated vegetable shortening Procter & Gamble brought to market in 1911. That accounts for the single tablespoon of it in an otherwise conventional sweet dough: the book's job was to put the tin in the recipe wherever it plausibly fit. The dish, titled Cherry Pie, closely resembles the sheet-pan fruit cake of Central European baking, the sort of thing sold as Kirschkuchen or cherry Kuchen thin yeast or short dough, breadcrumbs against the juice, fruit laid flat, sometimes a little custard poured over. German-speaking immigrant cooks brought that form to American kitchens through the nineteenth century, and it survives in Pennsylvania and the Midwest as "cherry kuchen."