Currant Pie
1 cup currants 1 cup sugar 1/4 cup flour 2 egg yolks 2 tablespoons water Mix flour and sugar, add yolks of eggs slightly beaten and diluted with water. Wash currants, drain, remove stems, then measure; add to first mixture and bake in one crust; cool, and cover with Meringue I. Cook in slow oven until delicately browned.
A single-crust custard pie built on fresh red currants, thickened with flour and yolks and finished with a meringue that uses the two whites left over. The whole thing hinges on which currant you reach for.
- Currants means fresh fruitThese are fresh red currants, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. Dried ones will give a leathery, oversweet filling; if fresh are out of season, frozen red currants thawed and drained work.
- Wash, then measureThe recipe has you wash, drain and stem the currants before measuring. A cup of stemmed, drained fruit is a good deal more fruit than a cup of loose clusters.
- Oven temperatures'Slow oven' in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 300F, which suits the meringue. Note that the recipe applies the term only to the browning stage and gives no temperature for baking the filled shell; if the filling is slow to set, a hotter oven first, dropped for the meringue, is a modern workaround.
- One crustAn unbaked bottom shell; the recipe gives no pan size. Blind-baking to light colour first, then adding the filling, may give a crisper base with such a wet fruit than the original method.
- Meringue IA cross-reference to the book's own meringue recipe. Two whites are exactly what this filling leaves over; consult the book's own stated proportions for the sugar.
- Cool before toppingFollow the instruction to cool the pie before the meringue goes on. Meringue spread on a hot filling weeps and slides off the crust edge.
- SweetnessA cup of sugar to a cup of currants sounds heavy, but red currants are sharply acid and the balance is about right. Taste the fruit before reducing it.
- YieldOne pie; the recipe specifies neither pan size nor number of servings. Best eaten the day it is made, as the meringue softens overnight.
Red currants were a fixture of American and British kitchen gardens well into the twentieth century, valued because they ripen in high summer, hang well on the bush, and are stiff with natural pectin and acid. That acid is why they turn up so often in pies, jellies and shrubs rather than being eaten out of hand. Currant growing in the United States later declined sharply after the plants were identified as a host in the life cycle of white pine blister rust and were banned or restricted in many states through much of the twentieth century, which is a large part of why the fruit is unfamiliar to cooks today. The two-yolk filling topped with a two-white meringue is characteristic of cookery-school writing of this era, where nothing was meant to be left over and recipes cross-referenced one another by number.