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Ripe Currant Pie
One cup mashed ripe currants, one of sugar, two table-spoons water, one of flour beaten with the yolks of two eggs; bake, frost the top with the beaten whites of the eggs and two table-spoons powdered sugar, and brown in oven. - Mrs. W. E. H., Minneapolis.
A single-crust custard-style pie of the kind that turns up all through the fruit sections of nineteenth-century community cookbooks: fruit, sugar, a thickener, yolks in the filling and whites on top. The original assumes you already have pastry rolled out and a hot oven going.
- The crust is assumedBuckeye Cookery gives pie pastry separately, so this recipe begins with a shell already in the pan. The quantities are small: they will make at best a shallow filling in an 8-inch shell, and thinner still in a 9-inch pan.
- "One of flour" means one tablespoonThe phrase follows "two table-spoons water," and the unit carries over. A single tablespoon of flour with two yolks is a light set, not a firm custard, which is what this filling should be.
- Oven temperatureBake the filled shell at 375F until the centre is just set and no longer sloshes, roughly 30 to 40 minutes. Return it at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes to colour the meringue.
- Meringue on a warm fillingSpread the beaten whites while the filling is still hot and seal them right to the pastry edge. Meringue set on a cold filling weeps underneath and shrinks away from the crust.
- Two tablespoons of sugar is a soft meringueThat is well under the roughly two tablespoons per white that makes a stable meringue. Expect a soft, quickly browning topping best eaten the day it is made.
- The currantsThese are red or white Ribes, not dried Zante currants, and they are sharply acidic and full of small seeds. Mash and, if you want a smooth filling, press through a sieve before measuring the cup.
- SugarEqual sugar to fruit is not excessive here given how tart ripe currants are; taste the mashed fruit before deciding to reduce it.
- YieldOne small pie, six modest slices. Cool completely before cutting or the filling will run.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Ohio, 1870s onward) was assembled from contributed recipes, each signed with initials and a town, and this one from Mrs. W. E. H. of Minneapolis is typical of the book's method: a few lines, no crust, no oven temperature, on the assumption that the reader already knows both. Currant bushes were a fixture of American kitchen gardens in the period, productive, hardy in the upper Midwest, and ripening in a short early-summer glut that had to be used at once, which is why currants appear in these books as pies, jellies, shrubs and wines rather than as something bought. Their near-disappearance from American cooking is generally traced to the early twentieth century, when currants and gooseberries were identified as alternate hosts for white pine blister rust and cultivation was restricted in many states; the bans have since been relaxed, but the pies never fully came back. The yolk-in-the-filling, white-on-top construction was thrift as much as technique, letting a two-egg pie use the whole egg.