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Mock Cherry Pie
½ cup cranberries (cut in halves) 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 tablespoon Five Roses flour dissolved in 1 cup water 1 egg Mix well together and bake between 2 crusts.
A wartime-thrift pie in miniature: cranberries cut in half stand in for sour cherries, and the whole filling is mixed in one bowl. The original gives no pan, no oven heat and no time, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The filling is very looseOne tablespoon of flour slack-mixed into a full cup of water is barely enough starch to set a cup of fruit. Expect a juicy, almost saucy pie; if you want a sliceable wedge, the flour needs roughly tripling, and it should be whisked into the water cold so it does not lump.
- Pan sizeA single cup of cranberries suits a shallow 8-inch pie plate. In a deep 9-inch dish the filling will sit in a thin layer and the top crust will collapse onto it.
- Oven heatNone is given. As a modern starting point, bake at about 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then reduce to 350F for a further 30 to 35 minutes until the juices bubble through the vents.
- The eggIt thickens and enriches rather than leavens, giving the filling a faintly custardy body. Beat it before adding so it disperses instead of setting in threads.
- Cut the berries, don't chop themHalving each cranberry lets the syrup and sugar reach the interior; whole berries burst unevenly and leave hard pockets.
- SugarA full cup to a cup of cranberries is right for the fruit's acidity and is not the place to economise. Reducing it much below three-quarters of a cup gives a filling most people find sharp.
- PastryFive Roses was milled from hard spring wheat and is stronger than modern all-purpose. For the crusts, use pastry or all-purpose flour and handle it lightly; save the strong flour for the thickening tablespoon, where gluten does not matter.
- Vent and coolCut generous steam vents, and let the pie stand at least two hours. Cut warm, this filling runs.
- YieldSix modest slices from an 8-inch pie.
Mock cherry pie belongs to a long line of North American "mock" dishes, in which a cheap and available ingredient impersonates an expensive or out-of-season one: mock turtle soup, mock apple pie from crackers, mock duck from a rolled flank steak. Cranberries were the obvious stand-in for sour cherries in the northern United States and eastern Canada, since they keep for months in a cold cellar or a barrel of water and turn the same deep red under heat, while cherries had a season of a few weeks. Many published versions of the pie stretch the fruit further with chopped raisins; this one, from the Five Roses Cook Book issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, is unusually spare and leans on vanilla to supply the cherry-like note. The book drew heavily on recipes sent in by Canadian housewives and printed many of them close to as received, which would account for the missing oven temperature and the assumption that the reader already knows how to make and roll a crust.