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Sour Cream Pie
1 cup sour cream 1/2 cup seeded raisins, chopped fine 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon cloves 3 yolks of eggs 1 white of egg Bake like lemon pie, using the whites of 2 eggs, with 2 table-spoons sugar for the meringue. Put on after pie is baked and brown in oven. If not linked that way, stir all 3 whites in together before baking.
A sour cream raisin custard in a pastry shell, given in the shorthand of a book that assumed you already knew how to bake a lemon pie. The blanks are worth filling in.
- "Bake like lemon pie"That means a pastry shell blind-baked or partly baked, the filling poured in, and the pie baked until the custard is set but still trembling at the center. The book gives no temperatures; in a modern oven something like 425F for 10 minutes, then 325-350F for 25-35 minutes will do, with the custard taken no hotter than about 175F or it will weep.
- The sour cream of 1910The sour cream of the period -- It was cream left to sour naturally with its own bacteria: thinner, sharper, and without stabilizers. Modern full-fat cultured sour cream is the closest match. Do not use light or fat-free versions, which contain gums and starches and can break in a baked custard.
- The egg arithmeticThe filling takes 3 yolks plus 1 white. The 2 remaining whites go into the meringue with 2 tablespoons sugar. The last sentence covers the alternative: skip the meringue and stir all three whites into the filling before baking.
- "If not linked that way"Almost certainly a misprint for "if not liked that way." The line reads as an either/or, not an extra step.
- Meringue timingSpread it on the baked, still-warm filling so it seals to the edge of the crust all around. The recipe says only to brown it in the oven; about 350F for 12-15 minutes will do it. Higher heat browns the peaks before the interior sets.
- A full cup of sugarSweet by current standards, and the raisins add more. Three-quarters of a cup makes the tang of the cream legible; the custard sets regardless, since the eggs and not the sugar do the work.
- Raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed, not that seeds were added. Any modern dark raisin is already seedless. Chopping them fine, as directed, keeps them suspended rather than sunk in a layer at the bottom.
- YieldProbably enough for one 8-inch single-crust pie, six modest slices. In a 9-inch shell the filling would run shallow; increase by half for a proper depth.
Sour cream raisin pie belongs to the dairy country of the upper Midwest and to Pennsylvania German kitchens, where it sat alongside shoofly and vinegar pie as one of the pantry pies made when no fruit was to be had. All of them share a logic: the acid and sugar and spice do the flavoring that fresh fruit would otherwise supply, and everything needed came from the cellar or the springhouse. Its presence in a milling company's promotional cookbook is a reminder of what such books were for. Washburn-Crosby published the Gold Medal series to sell flour, and such books were written on the assumption that anyone who could roll a crust already knew how a custard behaved. The instruction to "bake like lemon pie" is that assumption in plain sight.