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Upside-Down Fruit Pie
Rub a quart-sized baking-dish with Snowdrift and fill it with sliced apples, peaches, berries or fresh apricots, mixed with a cupful of sugar to the quart. Add a very little water. Cover and place in a hot oven, 375 degrees F., for twenty minutes. Then put on a crust, cut about one-half inch thick, of the Baking Powder Biscuit mixture, and bake fifteen minutes longer. Cool slightly, invert on a platter, and serve with cream, Lemon, Nutmeg, or Hard Sauce.
If canned or stewed and sweetened fruit is used, the preliminary cooking may be avoided, if the fruit is hot when the crust is put on.
A cobbler turned out upside down, with a biscuit lid that becomes the base on the platter. The original is unusually helpful in giving an actual oven temperature, which was still a novelty in cookbooks of this era.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening, the reason this book exists. Any solid vegetable shortening works, as does butter for greasing the dish.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names 375F itself, which by period vocabulary was called "hot" but sits at the upper end of what we would call moderate. Bake at 375F throughout; both stages assume the same heat.
- The dishA quart-sized baking dish means roughly a 1-quart casserole or a deep 8-inch pie plate. Depth matters more than width, since the fruit has to hold together when inverted.
- SugarA cup of sugar per quart of fruit is heavy by modern taste. Half to two-thirds of a cup suits most supermarket fruit; berries and ripe peaches need less still.
- ThickeningThere is none: "a very little water" plus the fruit's own juice is all the liquid. If your fruit is very juicy, a tablespoon of cornstarch tossed with the sugar will keep the platter from flooding.
- The crustRoll the biscuit dough half an inch thick and cut it as one round to the inside dimension of the dish, not to the rim, or the edges will ride up on the sides and stick when you invert.
- InvertingThis is the hinge. Cool for about ten minutes so the fruit sets slightly, but no longer, or the sugar begins to glue itself to the dish. Run a knife round the edge, cover with the platter, and turn over in one movement with a towel between your hands and the hot dish.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, usually flavoured with vanilla or brandy, served cold so it melts into the hot fruit. It is a sauce, not a cooked one, and keeps in the refrigerator.
- YieldA quart dish serves four to six.
This comes from a manufacturer's cookbook, one of hundreds issued by American food companies in the first decades of the twentieth century to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, sold as a clean, neutral substitute for lard at a moment when cottonseed oil was moving from an industrial by-product to a kitchen staple, and such books exist to put the brand name into as many instructions as possible. The dish itself is a cobbler by another route: instead of dropping biscuit over fruit and serving from the dish, the whole thing is turned out so the crust becomes a soaked base, a trick shared with the tarte Tatin and with the upside-down cakes that were becoming fashionable in America around the same period. The closing note about canned or stewed fruit is the practical heart of it, and points to a household where a shelf of put-up summer fruit was the normal starting point for a winter pudding.