Raisin Pie
1 cup sugar. 2 tablespoons flour. 1/2 cup molasses. 1 cup water Juice and grated rind of 2 lemons 1 cup seeded raisins Stir the flour into the sugar; then add the other ingredients in the order named. Bake between two crusts, slashing the upper one.
A plain lemon-and-raisin pie of the kind that got made in late winter when fresh fruit was gone. The method is sound, but the ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so treat the proportions with care before committing to a crust.
- Missing quantitiesThe instructions call for flour and sugar, but no amounts for either appear in the list, which runs only to water, lemons and raisins. Nothing in the text allows those figures to be recovered honestly; a comparable raisin pie recipe with stated proportions is the safer guide.
- Flour into sugar firstThis is the one step that matters. Dry-mixing the thickener with the sugar disperses the starch so it does not clump when the water and lemon juice go in. Skip it and you get flour lumps suspended in a thin filling.
- Seeded raisinsBefore seedless varieties were the norm, raisins contained seeds that had to be removed by hand; "seeded" in a recipe of this kind means raisins that have had their seeds taken out. Modern seedless raisins can simply be measured and used.
- Grated rindTake only the coloured zest of the two lemons and none of the white pith beneath, which is bitter. The rind carries most of the lemon aroma; the juice carries the acid.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. A double-crust fruit pie generally wants a hot start to set the bottom pastry, then a lower heat until the filling bubbles through the slashes; any figures here are a modern suggestion rather than anything recoverable from the text.
- Slashing the upper crustThe cuts are vents, not decoration. Without them steam lifts the top crust off the filling and forces juice out at the rim.
- YieldThe water and raisin quantities suggest roughly a single 9-inch pie, but with the flour and sugar amounts missing this can only be an estimate. Cool the pie before cutting or a starch-set filling will run.
Raisin pie belonged to the end of the storage year, when apples had gone soft and nothing fresh had come in yet; dried fruit, sugar, flour and a lemon were all things a well-stocked pantry held through March. It was known as funeral pie, a name generally traced to Pennsylvania German communities, where it could be assembled from shelf staples at short notice for a gathering. The loose-leaf format of Mrs. Fryer's book was itself a period fashion: pages could be removed, wiped and refiled, and household cooks added their own sheets to the binder.