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Cranberry Pies
Into a saucepan put one quart of nice clean cranberries and ¼ cup of water. Allow this to boil about ¾ hour, than add two full cups granulated sugar. After this has boiled about 15 minutes, stir in a piece of butter half the size of a nutmeg and onehalf teaspoon of cassia. Then set to cool.
This is only the filling; the book assumes you already have pastry rolled out and a hot oven going. Two things need attention before you start: the cooking time and the amount of liquid.
- The timing is the hingeCranberries burst and break down in 8 to 12 minutes. Three quarters of an hour over direct heat, then another 15 minutes after the sugar goes in, will reduce this to a scorched, bitter paste in a modern thin-bottomed pan. Cook the berries with the water, covered, until they have all popped, then add the sugar and simmer 5 minutes more to dissolve it.
- WaterA quarter cup is workable only over very low heat with a lid on, in heavy-bottomed ware. Half a cup is safer; the berries are mostly water themselves and the mixture thickens as it cools.
- A quart of cranberriesMeasured by volume, four cups, or roughly a pound — a supermarket bag is 12 oz (about three cups), so buy two. Frozen berries work without thawing.
- CassiaCassia is the coarser, hotter bark sold in North America simply as cinnamon. Half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon is the intended amount.
- Butter half the size of a nutmegA whole nutmeg is about the size of a large marble, so this is roughly 1 to 2 teaspoons. It is there for gloss and to soften the acidity, not for structure.
- SugarTwo full cups to a pound of berries is very sweet by current taste but does help the filling set, since cranberries are high in pectin. One and a half cups gives a sharper pie that still holds.
- Assembly and ovenThe book leaves this out entirely. Cool the filling completely — hot filling melts pastry — then fill a 9-inch double-crust or lattice pie and bake at 425F for 20 minutes, reducing to 350F for another 25 to 30, until the crust is browned and the juices bubble. A quart of berries should fill one 9-inch pie, though the plural title suggests the book may have had more than one in mind.
- Other usesCooked and cooled, this is a cranberry sauce with cinnamon in it, and keeps a week refrigerated.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its Five Roses flour, and like many milling-company books it is heavy on pastry, cakes and bread — the things that consume flour by the pound. Cranberries earn their place in a Canadian book honestly: the native cranberry grows wild in bogs across the eastern provinces and New England, was harvested and traded long before commercial cultivation, and keeps for months in a cold cellar without processing, which made it one of the few fresh acid fruits available to a northern kitchen between the last apples and the first rhubarb. The spice is named as cassia rather than cinnamon because grocers of the period distinguished the two: true Ceylon cinnamon was the finer and dearer bark, cassia the sturdier one, and by the early twentieth century much of the North American "cinnamon" on the shelf was said to be cassia — a distinction that persists in labelling law elsewhere but has quietly collapsed here.