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Green Currant Pie
Line an inch pie-dish with good pie-crust, sprinkle over the bottom two heaping table-spoons sugar and two of flour (or one of corn starch) mixed; then pour in one pint green currants washed clean, and two table-spoons currant jelly; sprinkle with four heaping table-spoons sugar, and add two table-spoons cold water; cover and bake fifteen or twenty minutes.- Miss S. Alice Melching.
A plain double-crust fruit pie from an era when currant bushes were a fixture of the kitchen garden and the unripe fruit was used rather than wasted. Two things need attention: the fruit itself, and a baking time that will not cook a covered pie through.
- Green currantsThese are unripe currants, picked firm and hard before they colour. They are markedly more acid and more astringent than ripe fruit, and they hold their shape rather than collapsing. Fresh ones turn up at farmers' markets for a week or two in early summer; ripe red currants can stand in, but reduce the sugar since they are sweeter.
- Sugar totalSix heaping tablespoons in all — two mixed with the flour on the bottom, four over the fruit. Against a pint of unripe currants that is a modest amount; taste and add more if the fruit is very hard and green.
- The thickenerTwo tablespoons flour or one of cornstarch, scattered dry on the crust rather than tossed with the fruit. Mixing it with the sugar and the fruit distributes it better and avoids a pasty layer at the base.
- "An inch pie-dish"Most likely a shallow plate about an inch deep rather than a modern 2-inch deep-dish tin. A standard pie plate is the nearest equivalent, and a pint of fruit will fill it thinly.
- Oven and timeFifteen to twenty minutes is short for a covered pie; the recipe gives no oven temperature. Bake until the crust is browned and juice bubbles thickly at the vent — considerably longer than the stated time. Underbaked fruit pie runs.
- Cover means top crust"Cover" here is a second sheet of pastry over the fruit, not a lid or foil. Cut vents; the currants throw off a good deal of liquid and sealed pastry will lift or split.
- YieldOne shallow pie, six modest slices. Cool before cutting or the filling will not have set.
Currants were among the most reliably productive fruits in a nineteenth-century American kitchen garden — hardy, prolific, and requiring no orchard — and Buckeye Cookery reflects a household that used the crop at every stage rather than waiting on ripeness. Green fruit pies of this kind, whether green currant, green gooseberry or green apple, took advantage of high acidity and high natural pectin to make a filling that set well with very little thickener. The two tablespoons of currant jelly here add sweetness. Cultivated currants largely disappeared from American gardens after federal and state bans in the early twentieth century aimed at white pine blister rust, for which Ribes species are an alternate host; the restrictions were relaxed unevenly from the 1960s onward, which is why a fruit ubiquitous in this book is now a specialty item.