Home › Cakes › Cherry Pie (Line a pie plate with half)
Cherry Pie (Line a pie plate with half)
Line a pie plate with half puff-paste and bake until delicately browned. Cook the cherries for several minutes in plenty of sugar, adding no water; pour them into the crust; cover with paste and bake in a quick oven.
A terse two-sentence formula that assumes you already know how to handle pastry. The order of operations is the unusual part: the bottom crust is fully baked before the fruit ever touches it.
- Why the shell is baked firstCherries throw a great deal of juice, and a pre-baked base is the period's answer to a soggy bottom. Blind bake it weighted at 400-425F until it is set and just coloured, then let it cool before filling.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-425F in period usage, though the term was never precise. At that heat the top crust should colour in 15-20 minutes, which is all the finished pie needs since the fruit is already cooked and the base already baked.
- Puff-pastePuff-paste of this period is a laminated butter dough, closer to rough puff than to modern all-butter pie dough. Store-bought puff pastry works; a standard shortcrust will also do, though it will not rise the same way over the fruit.
- The top crust problemLaying raw paste over cooked fruit in a fully baked shell means the lid bakes while the rim risks burning. Shield the edges with foil, or bake the lid separately on a sheet pan and set it over the filled pie.
- "Plenty of sugar" is not a measurementThe original gives no quantity. For 4 cups of pitted sour cherries, 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar is the usual modern range; sweet cherries need considerably less. Taste the fruit as it cooks.
- No water, and no thickenerCooking the cherries dry in sugar draws out and concentrates their juice, which is the whole point. There is still no starch here, so the filling will be loose. A tablespoon of cornstarch or tapioca stirred in near the end of the cooking gives a filling that slices.
- CherriesMost likely sour cherries, given the sugar; Montmorency or Morello are the usual cooking varieties. Frozen sour cherries behave well, though drain off some of the thaw liquid before you start.
- YieldThe recipe gives no size; a standard 9-inch plate would give six to eight servings. Cool at least an hour before cutting or the juice will run out of the shell.
Sour cherries were a common dooryard and orchard crop across the American Northeast and Midwest, with a short season in June and July that pushed households into a flurry of pitting, pie-making and canning; the instruction to add no water reflects how juicy fresh-picked sour fruit is, in contrast to pies built from dried or preserved fruit in winter.