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Mock Cherry Pie
1/2 C boiling water 1 heaping t flour 1 t vanilla Mix flour and sugar and add boiling water. Cook until thick and add fruit. Bake in 2 crusts. 3 C rich milk
This is a church-supper contributor's shorthand, and the transcription has come down to us scrambled: the ingredient list is incomplete and at least one line appears to belong to a neighbouring recipe. Treat it as a method to be filled in rather than a complete formula.
- What is missingSugar and "fruit" are both called for in the method but neither is quantified, and no fruit is named in the list. The line "3 C rich milk" belongs to no step here and is almost certainly a stray from the recipe printed above or below it on the page.
- The fruit in questionMock cherry pie is traditionally raw cranberries cut in half with raisins, which together mimic the colour and the sweet-tart bite of sour cherries. Published fillings vary; a workable proportion is about 2 cups halved cranberries to 1/2 to 1 cup raisins with 1 to 1 1/4 cups sugar.
- "Rich milk"In community cookbooks of this kind the phrase means unskimmed whole milk, often with the cream still on it. Nothing in this method uses it, so ignore it unless you are reconstructing the page's other recipe.
- ThickeningOne heaping teaspoon of flour to half a cup of water gives a thin glaze, not a set filling. Cranberries release a good deal of liquid as they bake, so 2 to 3 tablespoons of flour for a 9-inch pie is closer to what this filling needs.
- Vanilla timingAdd the vanilla after the flour paste has thickened and come off the heat. Boiled vanilla loses most of its aroma.
- OvenThe original gives none. A double-crust fruit pie wants 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the bottom crust, then 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes until the filling bubbles through the vents.
- Crusts"Bake in 2 crusts" means a bottom and a top; the recipe gives no plate size, and a 9-inch plate is a reasonable assumption. Cut vents; cranberry filling boils up freely.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. It cuts far more cleanly after two hours of cooling.
Mock cherry pie belongs to a large family of American "mock" dishes — mock turtle soup, mock apple pie, mock duck — in which cheap or shelf-stable ingredients stand in for something out of season or out of reach. Sour cherries have a short summer window and do not keep, while cranberries arrive in autumn and hold for weeks in a cold cellar, and raisins keep indefinitely; halved cranberries plumped with sugar give a convincing red, tart filling in the months when no cherry is available. Recipes of this kind circulate heavily in church and ladies'-aid fundraising cookbooks like this one, where contributors wrote for neighbours who already knew the dish and needed only a reminder of the proportions. That assumed knowledge is why so many entries, this one included, read as fragments today — and why typesetting errors in a locally printed volume could drop a line of ingredients without anyone noticing.