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Cranberry Pie
Prepare as for sauce, stewing two pounds fruit to one pound sugar. Pour into a pie plate lined with paste, cover with a top crust and bake.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already know the sauce recipe on an earlier page and can judge a pie by eye. The filling is essentially cranberry preserve, and its behavior in a crust is the thing the original leaves unsaid.
- The ratio, in modern termsTwo pounds of cranberries is about eight cups of whole berries; one pound of sugar is about two and a quarter cups. That is a tart filling by current standards, since many modern cranberry pie recipes call for proportionally more sugar. Taste the stewed fruit before it goes into the shell and adjust while it is still in the pan.
- "Prepare as for sauce"Cook the berries with the sugar and just enough water to keep them from scorching at the start, maybe half a cup. They release plenty of liquid once the skins burst, usually within eight to ten minutes over medium heat.
- Cool the filling firstHot filling melts the fat in the bottom crust before the oven can set it, which is the usual cause of a soggy base. Stew the fruit ahead and let it come to room temperature, or at least tepid, before it meets the pastry.
- ThickeningCranberries are high in pectin, so the sauce will set considerably as it cools, but two pounds of fruit still throws a lot of juice. If your stewed sauce looks loose, reduce it further in the pan rather than adding starch, or stir in a tablespoon of cornstarch or flour before filling.
- OvenA double-crust fruit pie wants a hot start: 425F for the first 15 to 20 minutes to set and brown the bottom, then 350F for another 25 to 30 minutes. The original gives no temperature at all; a cook of the period would have judged a wood- or coal-fired range by feel.
- The top crustCut vents or use a lattice. Cranberry filling boils vigorously and a sealed lid will lift or split, usually along the crimp, and run out onto the oven floor.
- Pie plateTwo pounds of fruit stewed down will more than fill a modern 9-inch plate. Expect some surplus, which keeps in the refrigerator as sauce for a week.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, eight slices. It cuts far more cleanly after several hours at room temperature than it does warm.
Cranberry pie belongs to a long American habit of turning any preserved fruit into a two-crust pie, and it appears in nineteenth-century Southern books, one might reasonably infer, largely because cranberries traveled and kept well. The berries grow in bogs in New England, New Jersey, and the upper Midwest, not Virginia, but they ship dry in barrels through the winter without spoiling, which made them one of the fresh fruits available in December and January to a household with rail or coastal access. That seasonality is why cranberry recipes in books of this period cluster around sauce, tart, and pie rather than anything requiring fresh summer fruit. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is characteristically terse here: the contributor assumes her reader has already made cranberry sauce many times and needs telling only that it can go into a crust.