Currant Pie
Wash and thoroughly pick the fruit. Sweeten liberally and put in a yellow baking-dish, adding a little boiling water to melt the sugar; let it simmer a little; then set it aside to cool. Pour into a pie plate, covered with paste. Dredge with flour. Cover with paste and bake.
A double-crust fruit pie stripped to its essentials, written for a cook who already knew how to make paste and judge a fire. The gaps worth filling are the sugar, the thickening and the oven.
- Picking the fruit"Pick" here most likely means stripping the currants from their stems, or strigs, though the phrase could also cover picking over for leaves and debris. A table fork drawn down each cluster does it quickly; a few underripe berries do no harm, being richer in pectin.
- The yellow baking-dishYellow ware — a plain buff earthenware glazed clear — was the standard cheap kitchen dish of the 1870s. Any non-reactive saucepan or ovenproof dish serves; avoid bare aluminium or cast iron, which the acid of the fruit will pick up as a metallic taste.
- "Sweeten liberally"Red currants are sharply acidic, and the original assumes you will taste. Figure roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of sugar per quart of berries, which is more than most modern berry pies take.
- Why the fruit is pre-cookedThe brief simmer dissolves the sugar and slackens the berries so they do not throw a flood of juice into a raw crust. Cooling before it goes into the pastry matters as much — warm filling melts the fat in the paste and gives you a sodden bottom.
- Dredge with flourThis is the thickener, and the amount is left to you. Two to three tablespoons scattered over a quart of cooked, drained fruit is a reasonable reading; more if the currants have released a lot of juice.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A pie of this kind wants a hot start to set the bottom crust — 425F for the first 15 minutes — then 350F for another 30 to 40, until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- Sealing and ventingCrimp the two crusts firmly together and cut steam vents. Currant juice is thin and runs freely; an unvented lid lifts and the filling escapes at the rim.
- YieldEnough for one 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Frozen currants work and need no thawing beyond what the simmering step supplies.
Red and white currants were a standard dooryard fruit in nineteenth-century American gardens — hardy, productive, and ripening in a narrow window in early summer when little else was ready — which is why cookbooks of the period treat currant pie, currant jelly and currant shrub as routine rather than special. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by housekeepers in Virginia and neighbouring states, is full of recipes written in exactly this shorthand: a cook who had made pastry a thousand times needed only to be told the order of operations. Currants largely disappeared from American kitchens in the early twentieth century, when the federal government banned Ribes cultivation in 1911 because the bushes host white pine blister rust; the federal ban was lifted in 1966, though some state restrictions survived far longer, and the crop is slowly returning, but a generation of American cooks grew up without ever tasting one.