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Brambles
Cook together for three minutes one cup of raisins, one cup of sugar, the juice of one lemon, the grated rind of half a lemon, and one beaten egg. Roll out some rich pie paste, cut in rounds; put a teaspoon of the mixture on one-half of each round, fold over after moistening the edges, press together and bake.
— Mrs. Wendell S. Sherman
A raisin turnover of the sort that turns up under a dozen names in American community cookbooks. The original assumes you know how to handle pie paste and how hot your oven runs, so the two things worth pinning down are the filling's texture and the bake.
- Chop the raisinsWhole raisins make a lumpy filling that tears the pastry when you fold it. Chop them coarsely, or pulse briefly, before they go in the pan.
- Cook the filling gentlyThree minutes over direct heat with a beaten egg in it will scramble if the pan is hot. Use low heat and stir constantly until the mixture thickens and coats the spoon, then cool it completely — warm filling melts the butter in the paste and the rounds will not seal.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was usual. Bake at 400°F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the pastry is set and lightly coloured at the edges.
- "Rich pie paste"In this period the term generally means a short crust with a high proportion of butter or lard to flour, richer than a plain crust rolled for a large pie shell; the exact proportion varied from cook to cook.
- Size of the roundsUnspecified, but a teaspoon of filling suits a round of about 3 inches. Larger rounds need proportionally more filling or they bake up hollow.
- SealingMoisten the edges as directed and crimp with a fork. Cut a small vent or two in the top; the filling steams and will otherwise split a seam and run onto the sheet, where the sugar burns.
Brambles appear in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American church and community cookbooks in roughly this shape: a raisin, sugar, lemon and egg filling folded into small pastry rounds. The name is sometimes linked to the bramble-jelly turnovers of British baking, though that connection is traditional rather than documented; here the fruit is the raisin, which was cheap, shelf-stable and available year round when fresh berries were not. Recipes credited to a named contributor — here Mrs. Wendell S. Sherman — are characteristic of the fundraising cookbook, a genre in which a congregation or ladies' aid society collected household receipts and printed them by subscription. The brevity is not carelessness: these were written by cooks for cooks who already knew what pie paste was and how their own stove behaved.