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Cherry Pie
1 pint canned or stewed cherries drained 1/2 cup cherry juice 4 tablespoons flour 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar Pastry Prepare plain or nut meal pastry and line the pie-tin. Sift the flour and sugar together. The amount of sugar needed will depend upon the amount used in cooked fruit. Sprinkle a layer of the flour and sugar over the pie crust. Fill with the canned fruit, and over the top of this sprinkle the remainder of the flour and sugar. Put on the top crust, pinch the edges together, and bake in a hot oven, until nicely browned. Other fruits may be used in the same way.
A pantry pie, built from a jar of put-up cherries rather than fresh fruit, and thickened with nothing but flour. It assumes a cook who knows how her own canned fruit was sweetened.
- Hot ovenA "hot oven" in books of this period is generally taken as somewhere around 425-450F. Start there to set the bottom crust, then drop the heat and bake until the filling bubbles thickly through the vents. The recipe itself gives neither temperature stages nor a time, only "until nicely browned."
- The half cup of juiceThe juice is listed among the ingredients but never mentioned again in the method. The sense of the recipe is that it goes over the fruit before the top crust is laid on; the flour and sugar are there to thicken it. If your cherries are very wet, use less.
- A pint of drained fruitA pint is 2 cups by volume, though the recipe does not make clear whether the pint is measured before or after draining. Either way it is a modest filling for an 8- or 9-inch tin. Home-canned cherries were often sour varieties packed in syrup; drained sweet cherries in light syrup will need the lower end of the sugar range.
- Judging the sugarThe recipe never tells you to taste; it says only that the sugar needed depends on how much was used in cooking the fruit, which is why the range is left as wide as 1/2 to 3/4 cup. Sample a cherry and its juice first, since commercially canned fruit today is often sweeter than home-canned fruit would have been.
- Flour as the thickenerFour tablespoons of flour will set the juice to a soft, slightly cloudy consistency rather than the clear gel cornstarch or tapioca gives. Sifting it with the sugar and scattering it dry, above and below the fruit, is what keeps it from lumping.
- Nut meal pastryGround nuts worked into the pastry, standing in for some part of the flour or fat; the recipe gives no proportions and refers the reader elsewhere. Any all-butter or shortening crust works here.
- Vent the topThe recipe says only to pinch the edges. Cut steam vents or the top crust will lift off the filling and the juice will find the seam instead.
- YieldOne double-crust pie, six to eight servings. Let it stand at least an hour before cutting; flour-thickened fruit is still liquid when hot.
Meatless cookbooks of the 1910s were aimed at vegetarians on principle. A cherry pie needs no defending on that count; what makes it belong to the book is the pastry, since lard was a common shortening of the day and a nut meal crust sidesteps it. The recipe also assumes something now uncommon, that a cook has her own canned cherries on the shelf and knows how heavily she sweetened them, which is why the sugar is given as a range and the reader is left to judge. Sour cherries preserved in summer were the ordinary basis of winter pie across the northern United States, and the closing line, that other fruits may be used in the same way, marks this as a method rather than a single dish.