Home › Flour Mixtures Continued: Pastry and Pies › Flour Mixtures Continued: Pastry and Pies: Cranberry
Flour Mixtures Continued: Pastry and Pies: Cranberry
OPEN CRANBERRY PIE OR CRANBERRY TART Spread the round of paste over an inverted pie plate (agate or tin is preferable), prick the paste with a fork, here and there, over the sides as well as the top. Bake to a dark straw color. Remove the paste from the plate, wash the plate and set the pastry inside. Turn a cooked filling into the pastry shell and set figures, cut from pastry and baked, above the filling. COOKED CRANBERRY FILLING Mix together, thoroughly, two level tablespoonfuls of cornstarch, half a teaspoonful of salt, scant measure, and one cup of sugar; pour on one cup of boiling water and stir until boiling, then add one-fourth a cup of molasses, a teaspoonful of butter and two cups of cranberries, chopped fine. Mix together thoroughly, and let simmer ten or fifteen minutes. Apple, peach or pineapple marmalade make good fillings for an open pie. Heat the marmalade and turn at once into the shell.
A blind-baked shell filled with a cooked cranberry paste, from a book scaled to two people. The technique of draping pastry over an inverted plate is the part most cooks will not have met before, and it is what makes the shell hold its shape without weights.
- The inverted plateRoll the round, lay it over the upturned bottom of the pie plate, and prick it all over so steam escapes and the pastry stays flat against the metal. It bakes into a rigid dome that is then lifted off and set right side up in the washed plate. No pie weights, no beans, no shrinking down the sides.
- Oven heatNothing is specified. An empty shell wants a hot oven; around 425F for roughly 12 to 15 minutes is a reasonable modern equivalent. Watch it rather than the clock: "dark straw color" points to a pale golden brown, not a deep brown.
- AgateAgate ware is enamel fused onto thin steel, the standard cheap kitchen pan of the period. Any metal pie plate does the same job. Glass and stoneware are heavier and slower and the shell is harder to release cleanly from them.
- Chopping the cranberriesTwo cups of berries chopped fine is a few short pulses in a food processor. Do not puree them; the filling wants texture, and skins left in pieces give it body.
- Making the fillingCornstarch, sugar and salt must be mixed dry before the boiling water goes in, or the starch will lump. Stir until it comes back to the boil and thickens, then add the molasses, butter and fruit. The ten to fifteen minutes of simmering is to soften the berries, so keep it at a bare simmer and stir often, since a hard boil after the starch has set will thin the filling again.
- MolassesUse unsulphured, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what the book intends. A quarter cup is doing real work here alongside the cup of sugar, tempering the acid of the fruit and darkening the colour.
- Assembly and timingFill the shell shortly before serving. Cranberry filling is wet and will soften a blind-baked base within a couple of hours. The cut pastry shapes are baked separately on a sheet and set on top at the last moment.
- YieldSized for the book's small household; the filling makes enough for one modest shell. Any leftover filling keeps a few days refrigerated and is good on toast.
Cranberries were one of the few fruits a northern American household could count on in midwinter, keeping for weeks in a cold cellar without sugar or canning, and they turn up frequently in New England cookbooks as pie, sauce and tart filling. The open tart with a pre-baked shell and pastry cut-outs laid on top is a genteel touch of the period. A cooked, starch-bound filling of this kind fits the era's enthusiasm for measured, predictable results. Molasses is the older element, a cheap sweetener long used with sharp fruit, and here it does what a modern cook might do with brown sugar.