Plum Pie
Use Plain or Chopped Paste. Remove stones from two cups plums; add one half cup sugar; dredge with flour; add two tablespoons lemon juice and one tablespoon butter.
A shorthand filling recipe of the kind common in 1900s American cookbooks, which assumed the reader already knew how to line and cover a pie plate. Everything unstated has to be supplied.
- "Paste" means pastryPlain paste is a standard shortened crust; chopped paste is a richer pastry in which the cold butter is chopped into the flour rather than rubbed in. The instruction to use either implies a lined plate and a top crust, i.e. a double-crust pie.
- The dredging flour is the thickener"Dredge with flour" is the whole thickening plan. Use 2 to 3 tablespoons tossed with the sugared fruit, more if the plums are very juicy, or the filling will flood the bottom crust.
- Quantity and pan sizeTwo cups of pitted plums is roughly 3/4 lb of fruit, enough for an 8-inch plate at best. For a modern 9-inch pie, increase the filling by half and keep the proportions.
- Sugar to taste the plumsHalf a cup for two cups of fruit suits tart cooking plums such as damsons or Italian prunes. Ripe supermarket plums need less, and with sweet fruit the two tablespoons of lemon juice can drop to one.
- No oven temperature is givenBake at 425F for the first 20 minutes to set and brown the bottom crust, then 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- Vent and catch the dripsCut steam vents in the top crust and set the pie on a foil-lined sheet. Plum juice boils over readily and burns on the oven floor.
- The butterThe recipe says only "add," and the single tablespoon was conventionally dotted over the fruit rather than stirred through it. It enriches the juices as they thicken.
- YieldSix modest wedges from an 8-inch pie. Best eaten the day it is baked, while the crust is still crisp underneath.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, is remembered for its chocolate work, but like most house cookbooks of the era it covers the whole domestic repertoire, and its dessert chapter runs through the standard American fruit pies. The terse phrasing here is typical: the paste recipes appear once, earlier in the book, and pies afterwards may simply refer back to them. Plums came in as a late-summer fruit, and the sugar and flour dredge serve to keep the juices in check. The lemon juice is doing what it still does in fruit pies, sharpening a flavor that goes flat under heat, and the tablespoon of butter reads as a gesture toward richness in a filling that is otherwise nothing but fruit and sugar.