Currant Pie
7 Use Plain Paste. For filling, mix two cups cleaned, fresh currants, two cups sugar, two tablespoons flour, two eggs, and one eighth teaspoon salt.
Bake with two crusts; or omit upper crust and cover with meringue when cooked.
A one-crust-or-two summer pie built on fresh red currants, thickened with egg and a little flour. The original assumes you already know the book's Plain Paste and gives no oven setting at all.
- The currants are fresh, not dried"Cleaned, fresh currants" means red or white Ribes currants, stemmed and picked over — not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle, which are small grapes. Two cups is roughly 8-9 oz. Frozen currants work if thawed and drained, though the filling will be looser.
- Plain PasteThe cross-reference is to the book's basic pie pastry, which for a recipe of this type would be flour, fat, salt and cold water. Any standard double-crust pastry recipe substitutes directly.
- The sugar is not a misprintTwo cups of sugar to two cups of fruit reads as extreme, but ripe red currants are very acidic and heavy sugaring is usual in period currant recipes. Cutting the sugar substantially will give a distinctly sour pie.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. As a modern working approach, start a filled double-crust fruit pie hot to set the bottom pastry — around 425F for the first 15 minutes — then drop to 350F for a further 30 to 35 minutes, until the filling is bubbling at the vents.
- The egg mattersTwo whole eggs with only two tablespoons of flour means this sets as a light custard around the fruit rather than as a runny fruit pie. It must be baked until the centre is just firm, then cooled fully before cutting or it will slump.
- The meringue versionThe instruction "when cooked" means the pie is baked first and the meringue added after. As written the filling takes two whole eggs; if you want a meringue you can instead put the yolks in the filling and beat the whites with about two tablespoons sugar per white, spread over the hot baked filling and brown in a moderate oven for 12-15 minutes.
- Vent the top crustAn egg-and-fruit filling gives off a lot of steam. Slash or prick the upper crust or it will lift away from the filling in a dome.
- YieldOne pie; the quantities suit an 8- or 9-inch plate, six to eight servings.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 under the name of Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of the many brand-sponsored cookbooks of the period, which carried a full general household repertoire alongside their chocolate chapters. Currant pie belongs to that general repertoire: red currants were a common dooryard bush in New England, ripening in early July, too tart for most tastes out of hand and usually destined for jelly, bar-le-duc, shrub, or a pie like this one. The custard-style filling, with whole eggs binding the fruit, and the offhand alternative of swapping the top crust for meringue are both found in American fruit pies of the period.