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Bachelor's Fruit Pie
1½ cups Five Roses flour 1 tablespoon (large) baking powder Pinch of spice to suit taste Pinch of salt 2 tablespoons brown sugar ½ cup raisins or currants Fresh milk to make biscuit dough Take a small deep granite pot or kettle, in which melt 2 tablespoons lard.
Put in the dough so that it will cover bottom, then melt 1 tablespoon lard and pour over top. Bake 15 minutes in quick oven.
Note on Fruit Pies-Put soda in sour fruit and pies will require less sugar.
A biscuit dough baked in a greased pot rather than a pastry shell — closer to a fruit scone or a shallow cobbler than to any pie a modern baker would recognize. It is small, fast, and forgiving, but two details in the original need translating.
- Quick ovenThe recipe calls for a "quick oven"; no temperature is given in the text. Period usage generally puts that somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat 15 minutes is plausible for a shallow round; test with a skewer at the centre before pulling it.
- The granite potGraniteware is enamelled sheet steel, not stone. Any small ovenproof saucepan, a 6- to 7-inch cast-iron pan, or a small cake tin will do the same job. The point is high sides and a heavy base so the lard does not scorch.
- That tablespoon of baking powderOne tablespoon (3 teaspoons) to 1 cup s of flour works out to about 2 teaspoons per cup, more than the 1 to 1 cup teaspoons per cup usual today. Early commercial baking powders varied in strength. With a current double-acting powder you may get a soapy, metallic edge unless you scale it back.
- Fresh milk to make biscuit doughNo quantity is given because the cook was expected to judge it. Figure on ½ to ⅔ cup, added until the dough is soft and just holds together — wetter than pastry, drier than batter.
- LardTwo tablespoons under, one over. Butter works but browns faster at this heat; shortening behaves most like the original. The lard poured over the top is what gives the crust its fried, biscuit-bottom character, so do not skip it.
- Spice"Pinch of spice to suit taste" means whatever was in the tin — cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, or mixed spice. A scant half-teaspoon total is in keeping with the sugar level.
- The soda noteThe appended tip applies to fruit pies generally, not to this dough. Soda neutralizes acid in sour fruit so less sugar is needed to balance it; it can also dull the fruit's colour and flavour. The practice is little seen now.
- YieldAbout four wedges from a 6- to 7-inch pan — one bachelor's supper plus breakfast. Best eaten warm the day it is made; it stales quickly.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and much of its content came in from Canadian housewives who wrote to the company. The book is thick with fast, thrifty, one-pan cooking rather than the elaborate set pieces of contemporary hotel manuals. "Bachelor's" dishes are often described as a recurring genre in North American cookery of the period: recipes framed as simple enough for a man cooking alone, meaning no pastry to roll, no separate crust, no equipment beyond a pot and an oven. The name "pie" here is doing loose work. What the recipe actually produces is a sweetened biscuit fried and baked in its own fat, studded with dried fruit, like pot pies baked without a bottom crust and skillet cakes turned out of the pan they cooked in. Raisins and currants appear rather than fresh fruit for the obvious reason that they kept all winter on a shelf.