Home › Pastry and Pies › Strawberry Pie
Strawberry Pie
1 cup flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 4 tablespoons shortening 1/4 cup cold water 1 quart strawberries Sift dry ingredients together; rub in shortening very lightly with finger tips; add water slowly, just enough to make a stiff dough. Roll out on floured board and use for bottom crust of pie, being careful to fold the paste well over the edge of pie plate. Bake in hot oven 12 to 15 minutes. It glazed crust is desired, brush edges after baking with boiling hot syrup (2 tablespoons corn syrup and one tablespoon water) and return to oven for one or two minutes until syrup hardens. Fill the baked crust with fresh selected hulled strawberries and cover with strawberry syrup made as follows: Add 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup ripe selected strawberries to 2 cups boiling water; bring to a boil and strain; add one tablespoon corn starch which has been mixed with a little cold water. Cook over hot fire for a minute or two, stirring constantly; remove from fire and beat hard; return to slow fire, cook very gently until thick. Pour while hot over strawberries which have been put into pie crust. This is very good served either hot or cold.
A baking-powder crust filled with uncooked berries and a cooked glaze — closer to a modern fresh strawberry pie than to a baked fruit pie. Two things need attention: the oven temperature and the thickness of the syrup.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no figure; "hot oven" in period sources is usually somewhere around 400–450F. At that heat 12 to 15 minutes is plausible for a single blind-baked shell; watch the folded rim, which colours first.
- Blind bakingThe crust is baked empty, so line it with parchment and weights or prick the base well. A baking-powder dough puffs more than a plain short crust and may lift away from the plate without them.
- Why baking powder in pastryThis is a Royal Baking Powder promotional book, so the leavening is in the pastry by design. The result is tender and slightly biscuit-like rather than flaky — pleasant here, since it has to hold a wet filling.
- ShorteningFour tablespoons to a cup of flour is a lean ratio. Any solid fat works; butter gives better flavour but softens faster, so keep it cold and handle the dough as briefly as the recipe implies.
- A quart of strawberriesRoughly 1½ lb, or about 4 cups hulled. The recipe gives no pan size; one cup of flour makes enough pastry for a shell of about 8 or 9 inches, which this quantity of berries would fill in a single close-packed layer. Choose small, firm, evenly ripe berries, as they are served raw.
- The syrup is thin as writtenOne tablespoon cornstarch to 2 cups liquid is a light ratio, and even after the gentle cooking the recipe calls for, the result is likely to stay pourable rather than setting as a glaze. For a syrup that clings to the berries, reduce the liquid to about 1 cup or use 2 to 3 tablespoons cornstarch.
- Cooking the starchFollow the sequence as written: boil, beat hard, then finish over low heat. Prolonged hard boiling and vigorous agitation both thin a cornstarch gel; the book offers no reason for this particular order.
- The corn syrup glazeBrushing the hot baked rim with boiling syrup seals it and keeps the edge crisp. It sets in a minute or two; longer and it darkens.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no pan size or yield; a shell from one cup of flour suits roughly an 8- or 9-inch plate, six to eight portions. Assemble no more than a couple of hours ahead — the berries weep and the crust softens overnight.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a large family of American booklets published by baking powder manufacturers from the 1880s onward, in which every recipe that could plausibly take baking powder does. Putting two teaspoons into a pie crust is the clearest sign of that: pastry had been made with fat, flour and water alone for centuries, and the leavened version is an advertising argument as much as a technique. The pie itself reflects a taste for fresh fruit served raw over a pre-baked shell, helped along by cheap cornstarch — a product commercialised in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century and widely promoted for puddings, sauces and fruit glazes. Strawberries, the first substantial fruit of the northern season, were a natural showcase, and glazed strawberry pies of this kind have remained familiar in American home cooking.