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Vinegar Pie
1 tablespoon (heaping) Five Roses flour 1 cup sugar 1½ tablespoons sharp vinegar 1 cup cold water Nutmeg to taste Beat the egg, flour and sugar together.
Add the vinegar and cold water. Flavor with nutmeg and bake with 2 crusts.
A one-crust-worth of filling stretched into a double-crust pie, made from things a pantry always had. The ingredient list omits the egg the method calls for, so read it as one egg.
- The missing eggThe instructions say "beat the egg" but no egg appears in the list. One large egg is the sensible reading; it is what sets the filling, since a single heaping tablespoon of flour will not hold a cup of water on its own.
- Vinegar strength"Sharp vinegar" here means an ordinary cider or white vinegar of household strength, broadly comparable to what is sold today. Do not substitute a mellow aged or balsamic vinegar; the point is a clean acid bite standing in for lemon.
- OvenBake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 35 minutes until the filling barely trembles at the centre. The recipe itself gives no oven direction at all, assuming a cook who knows her own oven.
- Mixing order mattersBeat the flour and sugar into the egg first, as written, before any liquid goes in. Flour tipped into water alone will lump, and there is no cooking-and-straining step here to rescue it.
- It is a soft-set pieWith one egg and a tablespoon of flour to a cup of water, the filling stays custardy rather than sliceable-firm. Cool it completely, several hours, before cutting; warm vinegar pie runs.
- Two crustsA top crust over a wet filling needs steam vents. Cut two or three slits or a small central hole, or the lid lifts and the filling boils out at the rim.
- Nutmeg"To taste" here means about a quarter teaspoon, freshly grated. Nutmeg is doing the work of masking the raw edge of the vinegar, so it is not optional decoration.
- YieldAbout enough filling for one 8-inch pie, six modest slices. In a 9-inch tin the layer will be thinner and the pastry-to-filling ratio less balanced. The recipe names no tin size.
Vinegar pie belongs to the family of what later cooks came to call desperation pies: sweet pies built from staples when fruit was out of season, expensive or simply absent. Vinegar and nutmeg together give a sharp, faintly spiced result that reads as a rough approximation of lemon, and the type is generally traced to rural North American kitchens of the nineteenth century, where a bottle of cider vinegar was always at hand and a lemon was not. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book is characteristic of the genre: the book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell Five Roses flour, and it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, so it preserves plain domestic baking of the sort that rarely reached professional cookery books. That the flour brand is named in the ingredient list, where a single heaping tablespoon is all that is used, tells you as much about the book's purpose as the recipe does about the pie.