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Puff Paste: Mexican
Sweeten and flavor with lemon. When the figs are smooth, put into the crust and bake. Take a meringue of whites of 2 eggs, beaten stiff, with 2 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar, flavor with McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, and as soon as the crust is baked, spread this over the top; let brown a minute or two.
Gooseberry Pie.
Cut off the blossoms and stems of berries and fill a pie dish lined with plain paste, spreading over the top MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK one third as much sugar as berries used. Slightly dredge with flour, and cover with a thin crust pricked with a fork. Bake half an hour.
Prune Pie. pound prunes, cupful sugar, cupful currant jelly or 1 teaspoonful lemon juice.
Stew prunes, remove stones, stir in sugar, currant jelly, or lemon juice.
Dust flour over the fruit, and bake with an upper crust.
Strawberry Pie.
Line a pie plate with thin paste and set in the oven till nearly baked.
Take from the oven and fill with sugared berries, dredge with flour, cover the top crisscross with narrow strips of paste, return to the oven, and finish baking.
Torto Frutas (Mexican). a Line the sides of a baking dish with puff paste; cover the bottom with sliced pineapple; next a layer of sliced oranges, then sliced bananas, then few slices lemon.
Sift sugar between each layer. Repeat the layers until the dish is full, and cover the top layer with chopped nuts. Lay over the top narrow strips of the pastry, and bake slowly an hour.-MAY E. SOUTHWORTH.
Cocoanut Pie. 2 cupfuls hot milk, 2 well-beaten eggs, cupful sugar, 1 cupful grated cocoanut, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Line a plate with paste, pour milk over eggs, set the bowl containing the mixture in boiling water, stir till thick, then take it out and stir in sugar, cocoanut, and vanilla. Fill the pie plate. Sprinkle top of pie with cocoanut, and bake till delicately brown.
Orange Pie. 1 cupful powdered sugar, 1 tablespoonful butter, 2 tablespoonfuls cornstarch, cupful cold milk, Grated rind and juice 1 orange, 1 egg, 2 oranges.
Beat sugar and butter together till light. Moisten cornstarch with milk, cook and stir one minute, pour quickly on butter and sugar; add the rind and juice of orange; mix wellbeaten egg; peel oranges, cut into slices, and cut each slice into quarters.
Line plate with paste, and bake in a quick oven until done. Stir the orange slices quickly into the custard mixture, fill the baked crust with this, and place in a quick oven a few minutes to brown. While it is browning, beat the whites of 2 eggs until light, add 2 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar, and beat until stiff. Spread this over the pie; dust thickly with powdered sugar, and stand again in the oven until delicately brown.
Dried-Apple Pie.
Soak the apples, put in a brown earthen pot, cover with water; cover the pot, and bake four or five hours; sweeten with sugar or molasses the last half hour and mash well with a spoon; when the apples are thoroughly cooked, flavor with lemon juice and add a little butter. The pie can be baked between two crusts, or bands of the paste can be placed over the top.
Banana Pie.
Yolks 2 eggs, cupful sugar, 2 large bananas.
Beat the yolks of eggs and sugar to a cream. Peel and mash bananas, beat into the eggs together with milk.
Bake with one crust; when done, cover with a meringue made of the 2 whites and 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, Serve cold.
Rhubarb Pie.
PUFF PASTE Wash rhubarb, cut in half-inch pieces, put in deep pie plate having narrow strip of paste around the edge, sprinkle with sugar mixed with flour, allowing cupful sugar and 2 tablespoonfuls flour to every cupful rhubarb. Cover with paste, and bake like apple pie. All juicy fruit pies should be made in the same wav.
This stretch of the pie chapter runs through a dozen fruit and custard fillings, all built on the same pastry. Several of the ingredient lists have lost their fractions, so treat the amounts below as guidance rather than transcription.
- Missing quantitiesWhere the text reads "cupful sugar" or "pound prunes" with no figure, a fraction has dropped out of the original list. For the prune pie, half a pound of prunes with half a cup of sugar and half a cup of currant jelly is in keeping with the period; for the banana and cocoanut pies, half a cup of sugar. The banana pie also calls for milk in the method but never lists it — about half a cup.
- Oven temperaturesA "quick oven" here is 425-450F, used for blind-baking and for browning meringue. "Bake slowly an hour" for the Torto Frutas means 300-325F, low enough that the fruit steams down without the pastry strips scorching.
- The hinge: blind-bake for wet fillingsThe strawberry and orange pies both bake the shell first, and that is the instruction that matters. Sliced fruit and cornstarch custard will not set a raw bottom crust in the time available; line the shell with parchment and weights at 425F for 15 minutes before filling.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaA branded bottled extract of the day. Named brands turn up in cookbooks of this period, sometimes through arrangements with the manufacturer, though nothing here documents such an arrangement. Use pure vanilla extract, same quantity.
- CocoanutFreshly grated coconut, unsweetened. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the custard cloying; use unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut, and if it is very dry, soak it in a little of the hot milk first.
- Cocoanut and orange custardsThe cocoanut mixture is cooked in a bowl set in boiling water before it goes into the shell; the orange filling's cornstarch is cooked and stirred for a minute directly. Take the cocoanut custard off the heat as soon as it coats a spoon thickly, around 170-175F; pushed further it curdles, and the second bake in the oven will finish the setting.
- RhubarbUse the stalks only. Rhubarb leaves contain enough oxalic acid to be genuinely poisonous and are always trimmed off and discarded. The sugar-to-flour ratio given, one cup sugar and two tablespoons flour per cup of fruit, is sound for very sour spring rhubarb.
- Dried-apple pieThe recipe gives no oven heat, only four or five hours in a covered earthen pot; a low oven of about 300F in a heavy lidded casserole is a reasonable modern equivalent. Modern quick-drying apple slices rehydrate faster than sun-dried fruit and may be done in roughly two hours.
- MeringueTwo whites with two tablespoons of sugar is a thin meringue by current standards and it will weep on a cold filling. Spread it while the pie is hot, seal it to the crust edge all round, and give it 5-8 minutes rather than "a minute or two" so the interior reaches a set.
- YieldThe recipe gives no pan size or yield; these quantities suit a standard pie plate, roughly six to eight servings. The Torto Frutas is built in a deep baking dish and will stretch further.
Pie chapters like this one are a good measure of how American baking worked around 1900: a single pastry recipe at the head, then page after page of fillings dictated by whatever the season or the pantry offered, from spring rhubarb through summer gooseberries and strawberries to winter's dried apples and stewed prunes. The Torto Frutas, credited to May E. Southworth, is essentially a layered tropical-fruit tart assembled from pineapple, oranges and bananas. The call for a named brand of Mexican vanilla is characteristic of the era's community and promotional cookbooks, in which manufacturers' products were sometimes written directly into the instructions.