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Mock Cherry Pie (One cup of cranberries)
One cup of cranberries, one-half cup of raisins, three-fourths of a cup of sugar, one tablespoon of cold water, one tablespoon of flour, one teaspoon of vanilla. Chop raisins and cranberries together.
— Mrs. Edward Overbaugh
This is a filling, not a whole pie — the pastry is assumed, as it usually is in a community cookbook where every contributor already had a crust she trusted. A few things need filling in.
- What it makesOne cup of cranberries plus a half cup of raisins chops down to only about 1½ cups of filling, which is scant even for a shallow 8-inch double-crust pie; scale up by half for a 9-inch pan.
- Assembly and bakingThe original gives no baking directions. By modern practice: line the pan, add the filling, cover with a top crust or lattice, and vent it; start hot (around 425F) for about 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 350F for 25 to 30 minutes until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- Chop, do not process"Chop raisins and cranberries together" means a coarse chop with a knife or a few pulses at most. The illusion of cherries depends on recognizable pieces of fruit; a food processor run too long gives you a purple sludge that bakes into jam.
- One tablespoon of flour is deliberateCranberries carry their own pectin, and one tablespoon of flour will give a loose, juicy filling rather than a sliced-firm one. A tablespoon of cornstarch instead will cut more cleanly and set clearer than flour.
- The waterA single tablespoon looks like a typo and is not. The chopped fruit releases a great deal of liquid in the oven; more water at the start means a flooded bottom crust.
- VanillaStir it into the raw filling, not into anything hot. Some of it will bake off; what remains rounds off the cranberry's sharpness so the fruit reads more like cherry.
- SugarThree-fourths of a cup with fresh cranberries is on the tart side by modern taste. Taste the chopped fruit and go to a full cup if your berries are especially sour; frozen berries, thawed and drained, need no adjustment.
Mock cherry pie belongs to a long American tradition of "mock" cookery — mock turtle, mock apple, mock duck — in which a cheap or seasonally available ingredient stands in for something dearer or out of reach. Sour cherries have a short summer window and do not keep; cranberries arrive in late autumn, hold for weeks in a cold cellar, and turn the same dark red when cooked, while raisins supply the sweetness and the soft, chewy body that fresh cherries would have given. Recipes of this exact shape circulated widely from the late nineteenth century onward. A receipt signed by a neighbor like Mrs. Overbaugh is a winter pie: made from what was already in the house, in the months when no fresh fruit was.