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Peach Pie (Bake in two separate tins)
Bake in two separate tins an under and upper crust in a quick oven fifteen minutes; when done place in the lower crust one quart peaches prepared by slicing, and adding three table-spoons each of sugar and cream, cover with the top crust, and place in oven for five minutes. Treat strawberries, raspberries, etc., in the same way. -Mrs. F. L. T., New Orleans.
This is not a baked pie in the usual sense: both crusts are blind-baked empty, then filled with raw sweetened fruit and given five minutes of oven time to warm through. It succeeds or fails on the ripeness of the peaches and on how quickly it reaches the table.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat should be about enough for a fully baked, empty shell of standard pie pastry, though watch it.
- Baking two crusts separatelyLine one tin with pastry for the bottom; roll the top crust and lay it flat in a second tin of the same diameter, or on an inverted tin so it takes a slight dome. Prick both all over and weight the bottom shell with beans or pie weights, or it will lift and buckle.
- A quart of peachesRoughly 1.5 to 2 lb of fruit, or four to six medium peaches, sliced. Peel them if the skins are tough; freestone varieties are far less work than clingstone.
- Sugar and creamThree tablespoons of each for a full quart of fruit is restrained, and assumes peaches at their peak. Taste and adjust before filling. The recipe says only "cream"; in a period household that meant the top of the milk, so anything from light to heavy cream is in keeping.
- The hingeSlice, sugar and fill at the last possible moment. Sugared raw peaches throw juice within minutes, and a baked shell holding wet fruit turns to paste. The five minutes in the oven is to take the chill off and settle the top crust, nothing more.
- Fruit quality does all the workNothing here cooks, thickens or concentrates. Underripe or mealy supermarket peaches will taste exactly as they do out of hand. The same applies to the suggested strawberries and raspberries.
- Serving and yieldA quart of fruit suits a tin of about 9 inches; six to eight portions. Cut and serve immediately, with additional cream at the table if you like; it will not sit for long, and refrigerating it only softens the pastry further.
Buckeye Cookery (generally dated to a first Minneapolis publication in 1877, with reissues through the 1880s) gathered contributions from housekeepers across the country, and the credit to Mrs. F. L. T. of New Orleans is typical of how the book worked: a name, an initial, a town. The method itself rests on the sensible observation that ripe soft fruit gains nothing from forty minutes in an oven. Baking the crusts empty and dry also sidesteps the perennial complaint of nineteenth-century pie making, the sodden under-crust, which cookbooks of the period attack with everything from egg washes to layers of breadcrumbs. That the recipe closes by extending the technique to strawberries and raspberries marks it as a warm-weather formula.