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Cherry Pie
Black cherries are generally considered best for pies. Wash and pick the fruit, and place it in a pie-dish, piling it high in the middle; strew a little sugar over it, and cover it with a light crust. Bake in a good oven for about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost of cherries, 3d. to 6d. per pound. A pie made with two pounds of fruit will be sufficient for four or five persons.
A deep-dish English fruit pie with a crust on top only, and almost nothing else to it. The vagueness is deliberate — the book expects the cook to know how a pie-dish is filled.
- "A good oven"Probably a fairly hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-425F; the book gives no figure. The pie needs early heat to set and lift the pastry lid. If the crust colours too fast, drop to 375F after the first 20 minutes.
- Pie-dish, not pie plateThis is a deep oval or round earthenware dish with a rim, filled to the brim and covered with a single sheet of pastry — no bottom crust. A 1.5-quart baking dish works; wet the rim so the pastry grips, and cut a vent.
- Pile it high in the middleThe instruction matters. Cherries collapse considerably as they cook, and a domed heap of fruit — or an inverted eggcup or pie funnel in the centre — keeps the crust from sinking into the juice.
- "A light crust"Most likely a rough puff or flaky paste rather than a heavy short crust or a suet crust, though the recipe does not specify. Roll it a little thicker than you would for a tart; it has to bridge the fruit unsupported.
- StonesThe recipe's "pick" may mean no more than removing stalks, and cherries were sometimes baked with the stones left in at this date; how usual that was is not something this entry tells us. Pit the fruit if you prefer, but expect noticeably more juice and a looser filling.
- Sugar and thickening"a little sugar" is unquantified; 3-4 oz (1/2 cup) for two pounds of fruit is a reasonable modern guess, less for sweet dark cherries. There is no flour or cornflour here, so the juice stays thin -- stand the dish on a baking sheet to catch what boils over.
- Which cherries"Black cherries" in a British book of this period usually means dark sweet varieties, though sour Morellos make the better pie by modern taste and want a good deal more sugar.
- YieldThe original is clear: two pounds of fruit serves four or five.
Cassell's belongs to the English tradition of the deep fruit pie, which is not a pie in the American sense at all — the fruit sits in a china or earthenware dish and wears only a pastry hat. The costing, threepence to sixpence a pound, places cherries as a cheap high-summer glut rather than a luxury; the whole point of the entry is to tell a household cook what a given weight of fruit will feed and what it will cost. Leaving the stones in was, by many accounts, common enough, and is often said to have been thought to improve the flavour, the kernels lending a faint almond note during baking — plausible chemically, though the more likely reason is that pitting two pounds of cherries by hand is tedious work.