Health Pie
A pie far more palatable and digestible than the ordinary American pie is made by using an earthen or porcelain baking dish and omitting the bottom crust. Fill the dish well with fruit and sugar; cover with paste and bake as usual.
This is a deep-dish fruit pie written in shorthand for cooks who already knew what "paste" and "bake as usual" meant. The instructions assume a great deal, so here is what they leave out.
- Paste means pastry"Paste" is any short or puff pastry dough; a single-crust quantity is all you need. Roll it a little thicker than for a two-crust pie, since it has to bridge the whole dish unsupported.
- The dish is the pointAn earthen or porcelain dish holds heat gently and will not react with acidic fruit, which tinned or bare iron pans of the period would. A modern stoneware or glass baking dish of 1.5 to 2 quarts does the same job; avoid uncoated aluminium with rhubarb, cherries or plums.
- Quantities are entirely up to you"Fill the dish well with fruit and sugar" is all the original offers. For a 2-quart dish reckon on about 2 lb prepared fruit and 3/4 to 1 cup sugar, less for sweet berries and more for gooseberries or sour cherries.
- Bake as usualFor a raw fruit filling, 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then 350F for another 35 to 45 minutes until the juices bubble thickly at the edge.
- Thicken or it will floodWith no bottom crust the juice has nowhere to go but up against the pastry. A tablespoon or two of cornstarch, or three of flour, tossed with the fruit and sugar keeps the underside of the crust from turning to paste in the literal sense.
- Support the lidFruit collapses as it cooks and the crust sags into the gap. Mound the fruit above the rim, or stand an inverted cup or a pie funnel in the centre. Cut two or three steam vents before it goes in.
- YieldA 2-quart dish serves six to eight. Serve warm rather than hot, with cream.
The claim that a crustless-bottomed pie is "more palatable and digestible" belongs to the American health-reform current that ran from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, when dyspepsia was discussed as a national affliction and pie was one of its favourite suspects. The soggy under-crust of a fruit pie was a standard villain in that literature, and cutting it out reduced both the shortening and the indigestible bulk while leaving the dish recognisable as pie. What is being described is close to the English deep-dish fruit pie, baked in a pie dish with a single lid of pastry and often a funnel to hold it up.