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White Seedless Grape Pie
Mrs. Ruby Treptow.
Stem and wash about 1½ lb. of small seedless grapes. Place in crust and add three-fourth cup of sugar and one level tablespoon of flour mixed with sugar. Place strips of crust across the top and bake slowly. Grapes may be cooked a little first or used raw. 1 C cocoanut 1 pt. milk 1/2 C sugar Ruby Williams.
A plain two-crust fruit pie of the sort that filled the luncheon pages of church cookbooks: no oven temperature, no pan size, and no bottom-crust recipe, all assumed known. A few things need pinning down.
- The stray lines at the endThe "1 C cocoanut, 1 pt. milk, 1/2 C sugar / Ruby Williams" is not part of the grape pie; it carries a different contributor's name and unrelated ingredients, and appears to be a fragment of another recipe run together with this one. Ignore it here.
- "Bake slowly"In a wood or early gas range a slow oven was generally reckoned somewhere around 300-325F. For a fruit pie with a raw bottom crust, a common modern approach is to start at 425F for 15 minutes to set and brown the base, then drop to 350F for another 30-40 minutes until the filling bubbles through the lattice.
- Pan and crust1½ lb of grapes with sugar and flour fills a standard 9-inch pie plate. You need pastry for a bottom crust plus enough for the lattice strips; the book assumed you had a house pastry recipe already.
- The grapes"Small seedless" most likely means Thompson Seedless, the common green seedless table grape. Modern seedless grapes tend to be larger and sweeter, so the pie will be juicier and less tart; a squeeze of lemon sharpens it back up.
- Raw or precookedThe choice matters more than the recipe lets on. Raw grapes release a lot of liquid late in the baking and can leave a slack filling. Simmering them briefly first, then thickening, gives a filling that slices cleanly.
- The thickenerOne level tablespoon of flour is light by current standards for this much fruit. Rubbing the flour into the sugar before adding, as directed, is the right technique — it keeps the starch from clumping in the juice.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Cool at least two hours before cutting; fruit pies set as they cool, not in the oven.
Grape pie is a northern fruit-belt dish, most associated with the Concord grape country of western New York, where the skins are slipped from the pulp, the pulp cooked and seeded, and the two recombined — a fussy business that made a seedless version like this one a genuine shortcut. Thompson Seedless grapes, shipped east from California in growing quantity through the early twentieth century, put a pie like this within reach of a cook who would never have seen a vineyard. Community cookbooks of this kind are often said to have been organized around occasions — the church luncheon, the ladies' aid meeting — rather than courses, and a pie that could be assembled from grapes, sugar, flour and a standing pastry recipe was exactly what such an occasion called for.