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Cranberry Pie
Use one cup of cranberries, half a cupful of raisins, one cup of sugar, one cup of water, one table-spoonful of flour, and one tea-spoonful of vanilla. Chop the cranberries and raisins fine, and stir in the flour, sugar, vanilla, and water. Bake with upper and under crusts. Probable cost, 1s.
A late-Victorian mock mincemeat: cranberries and raisins chopped fine, sweetened, and baked between two crusts. The original assumes you already know how to make pastry and how hot your oven is, so both need filling in.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because a range cook judged by hand. Start at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 375F for 30-35 minutes until the filling bubbles through the vents.
- Chop, do not cookThe filling goes into the shell raw. Chopping the cranberries fine is the hinge of the recipe: whole berries burst and release their liquid unevenly, while a fine chop lets the fruit and its pectin thicken more evenly as it bakes.
- The flour is doing a lot of workOne tablespoon of flour against a cup of water is a thin bind by modern standards. Cranberry pectin makes up the difference, but expect a soft, spoonable filling rather than a clean slice; an extra spoonful of flour is defensible if you want it to hold.
- Cup sizeAmerican cup measures of this period run close to today's 8 fl oz, so a cup of cranberries is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 oz of whole berries. Cranberries, sugar and water are used in equal measure, which makes the recipe easy to scale.
- RaisinsNineteenth-century raisins were often seeded at home and dried harder than modern ones. Today's soft seedless raisins need no soaking, but they will chop more easily if you flour the knife.
- Pastry and ventsNo crust recipe is given here, so use a standard short crust. Cut generous vents in the top: the filling is very wet and gives off a good deal of steam.
- YieldEnough for one small double-crust pie, perhaps six modest slices; the quantities are sparse for a full 9-inch tin. It is best served just warm, when the filling has thickened but not chilled to a solid.
- "Probable cost, 1s."One shilling. It is a period price signal rather than any guide to quantity, and can be ignored.
Cranberry pie belongs to a family of Victorian "mock mince" pies that used sharp fruit, raisins, sugar and spice to imitate the richness of a true mincemeat without suet or meat. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery is generally traced to London in the later nineteenth century and drew freely on American material, which is very likely how this one arrived: the cup-and-teaspoon measures here are American rather than the imperial weights the book uses elsewhere. The vanilla is the modern touch for its day, standing in for the brandy or nutmeg an older mincemeat would have carried.