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Cranberry Pie
Use Plain or Chopped Paste. Fill with two cups cranberries, one and one half cups sugar, one quarter cup water, and one tablespoon butter. Cover with upper crust or a lattice of paste strips; or bake without any upper crust. Decorate when done with pastry baked in fancy shapes. Cranberry Pie No. 2 Use Plain Paste. For filling, mix one and one quarter cups chopped cranberries, one half cup chopped raisins, one cup sugar, one quarter cup water, and one tablespoon butter.
This is sometimes called Mock Cherry Pie.
A straightforward raw-fruit pie: the cranberries cook in the shell, so the sugar and the small amount of water do all the work. Two versions here, the second sweetened and softened with raisins.
- Paste"Plain Paste" and "Chopped Paste" are the book's own crust recipes, cross-referenced here; chopped paste appears to be the version in which the fat is cut in coarsely rather than rubbed to meal. Any modern all-butter or shortening double-crust dough will serve.
- Pie sizeThe recipe gives no plate size; the quantities suit a standard pie plate. A 12-oz bag of cranberries is roughly three cups, so two cups is about two-thirds of a bag.
- OvenNo temperature is given, as was usual. Bake a fruit pie hot at first, around 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes until the filling bubbles thickly through the vents.
- Cut the berriesWhole cranberries burst and release a lot of liquid; No. 2 chops them, though the recipe does not say why, and chopping also helps the filling pass for cherry. Halving the berries in the first version gives a filling that sets rather than sloshing.
- No thickenerThe recipe relies on cranberry pectin alone. It will be loose when hot and firm as it cools, so let the pie stand at least two hours before cutting. A tablespoon of cornstarch or flour tossed with the sugar is a reasonable insurance policy.
- SweetnessOne and a half cups of sugar to two cups of berries is a high ratio by modern taste but not excessive for raw cranberries, which are punishingly tart.
- DecorationThe "pastry baked in fancy shapes" is cut from scraps, baked separately on a sheet until golden, and laid on the finished pie. Baking them apart keeps them crisp and unstained.
- Mock CherryFor No. 2 the raisins are already chopped; keeping them to roughly cranberry size helps them hydrate evenly in the filling.
Cranberry pie belongs to the New England pantry that Lowney's, a Boston chocolate company, was writing for: a native bog fruit that keeps for months in a cold cellar and needs no preserving to be useful in midwinter. The "Mock Cherry" name of the second version reflects the long American habit of imitation baking, in which cheap, storable ingredients stand in for something out of season or out of reach; mock apple pie made from soda crackers and mock mince made from green tomatoes come from the same impulse. The combination of chopped cranberry and raisin does read convincingly as sour cherry once baked, and the trick is generally traced to nineteenth-century home cooks rather than any single published source. That the book comes from a chocolate manufacturer is worth noting: promotional cookbooks of this period padded their chocolate recipes with a full complement of ordinary household ones, which is why a cranberry pie with no cocoa in it sits here at all.