Crumb Pie
Soak in a little warm water one tea-cup bread-crumbs half an hour, add three table-spoons sugar, half a table-spoon butter, half a cup of cold water, a little vinegar, and nutmeg to suit the taste; bake with two crusts, made the same as for other pies. - Miss Sylvia J. Courter.
A thrift pie from the era when a pie was expected on the table whether or not there was fruit in the house. The instructions are terse; the useful part is knowing what texture to aim for and how loose the filling will be going into the shell.
- What the crumbs should beThis means soft crumbs torn or rubbed from stale white bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold for coating. Dry packaged crumbs will drink the liquid and set into paste. Use about three-quarters of a cup of soft crumbs, loosely packed, to match the tea-cup called for.
- A tea-cupBy the usual nineteenth-century convention a tea-cup is reckoned at roughly three-quarters of a modern 8-ounce cup, smaller than the coffee-cup also used in books of this kind. Half a cup of cold water plus the soaking water gives a filling that is quite wet when it goes in.
- The vinegar is unmeasured"A little vinegar" is genuinely ambiguous. One to two teaspoons of cider vinegar is in keeping with related vinegar pies of the period; it is there to supply the tartness fruit would have given, so add it to taste before the crusts go on.
- OvenBuckeye Cookery assumes a wood range and gives no number. Bake at 400F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then 350F for another 30 to 35 minutes until the top is well browned and any leakage at the vents looks thickened rather than watery.
- There is no egg and no starchNothing binds this filling but the swollen crumbs, so it will never slice as cleanly as a custard or fruit pie. Let it cool at least an hour; cut warm, it runs.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. Nutmeg is doing nearly all the flavouring work here, and pre-ground nutmeg that has sat in a cupboard will leave the pie tasting of little more than sweet bread.
- SweetnessThree tablespoons of sugar reads thin to a modern palate accustomed to fruit pies carrying a cup or more. Taste the filling before assembling and adjust; a spoonful of molasses or brown sugar is period-appropriate if you want more depth.
- YieldEnough for one small, thinly filled double-crust pie — an 8-inch tin rather than a 9-inch — six modest wedges. It is best the day it is made.
Crumb pie belongs to a family of nineteenth-century American "mock" pies — vinegar pie, water pie, cracker pie, so-called mock apple — built from pantry staples when fruit was out of season or out of reach. The logic is straightforward: crumbs or crackers give body where apples would, vinegar gives the acidity, and sugar and nutmeg supply the rest. Buckeye Cookery, which appeared first in an 1876 Ohio edition and then in the widely circulated Minneapolis edition of 1877, compiled from contributions by named Ohio and Midwestern housekeepers, is full of such economies, and the attribution to Miss Sylvia J. Courter is typical of how the book worked: a community collection in which recipes carried the name of the woman who vouched for them. Pies of this kind are often described as Depression-era, but they are considerably older, and their real context is simply the winter and early spring of a household that did not have year-round produce.