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Cranberry and Raisin Pie
1/2 cup raisins 1 cup cranberries 2/3 cup sugar 1/2 cup water 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon vanilla A few grains salt Grind the cranberries and raisins through a food chopper. Stir the flour smooth with a little of the water. Heat the rest of the water to boiling, and stir into it the flour mixture. Add the remaining ingredients. Bake in two crusts.
A thrifty two-crust pie built on the winter pantry: dried fruit, cranberries and a flour-thickened syrup. The original gives no oven setting and no pan size, so both need supplying.
- OvenBake a double-crust fruit pie at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the bottom crust, then drop to 375F for another 25-30 minutes until the vents bubble thickly. Only the thickener is cooked in advance; the ground fruit goes in raw and cooks in the shell.
- Pan and yieldThe quantities here are small by modern standards. This fills a 7- or 8-inch pie plate thinly, or makes a generous half-batch of filling for a 9-inch. For a standard 9-inch pie, one and a half times everything is closer.
- Food chopperA hand-cranked food chopper produced a coarse, uneven mince. Pulse the cranberries and raisins in a food processor five or six times; do not run it to a puree, or the filling loses all texture.
- Cook the thickener firstThe flour paste must actually come to a boil with the water and thicken before the fruit goes in, otherwise the pie tastes of raw flour. Two tablespoons of flour to half a cup of water gives a thick, gluey base by design; it thins as the fruit releases juice.
- CranberriesFresh or frozen both work, and frozen need no thawing before grinding. Cranberries are naturally high in pectin and acid, which helps the filling firm up as it cools alongside the flour.
- SugarTaste the cooked filling before it goes into the shell and adjust then if wanted, since you cannot alter it once the top crust is on.
- VanillaAdd it off the heat, after the mixture has stopped boiling, so the flavour is not driven off.
- ServingCool to room temperature before cutting; hot from the oven the filling runs. Six slim wedges from an 8-inch pie.
Cranberry pies belong to the late-autumn and winter stretch of the American year, once the bogs of Massachusetts and New Jersey had been harvested and the berries could be kept for some weeks in a cold cellar. Raisins were a common sweetening and bulking agent in such pies: they soften into the syrup, add sugar of their own, and stretch a single cup of fresh fruit into a full two-crust pie. The pairing is close kin to the mock mince and "raisin pie" formulas found in the pie chapters of American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, all of them ways of getting a rich filling out of the dried-fruit shelf. The instruction to grind everything through a food chopper suggests the decades when the clamp-on hand chopper was a common piece of household equipment.