Home › Squaw Feeds Paleface › Biscuit Pie
Biscuit Pie
Make a short biscuit dough, using 4 tablespoons fat to 2 cups flour, just as you would if making shortcake. (See recipe for Biscuits.) Without handling the dough more than necessary, divide it into 2 unequal portions. Roll out the larger portion to fit bottom and sides of a small frying pan or a deep pie plate, or a square pan if you have one. Have your dough 1/2 inch thick. Fold it in order to move it easily, lay in pan, and unfold-hope it fits. Fill with sweetened stewed fruit, either fresh, canned or dried, applesauce being best. Dot with butter, and sprinkle with spice if you have it. Roll out smaller piece of dough to fit top. Lay it on, trim off edges, and press together all around edge with a fork, or with fingers, and slit some holes for steam to escape. Bake in reflector oven, or heat another pan of same size for a cover, bury all in hot ashes and heap still hotter ashes on top.
A camp cobbler built like a two-crust pie, with biscuit dough standing in for pastry. It behaves well in a home oven, and the only real variable is how wet the fruit is.
- The dough4 tablespoons fat to 2 cups flour is a modestly short biscuit dough; add roughly 1/2 teaspoon salt and 2 teaspoons baking powder per cup of flour if your reference recipe is not to hand, plus about 2/3 cup milk or water. Bring it together in as few strokes as possible — overworked biscuit dough turns tough and lines the pan like cardboard.
- Oven temperatureIn a conventional oven, bake at 425F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the top crust is set and browned and juice bubbles through the vents. Biscuit dough wants a hot, fast bake; a moderate oven leaves the bottom crust pale and doughy under wet fruit.
- Reflector ovenA reflector oven is an open-fronted metal box set beside the fire, baking by radiant heat off angled tin. Expect uneven browning and turn the pan once partway through. A hot fire with a good bed of coals will get close to the heat this needs, though the temperature inside a reflector oven is hard to judge.
- The ash methodBurying the pan in ashes with a heated pan inverted as a lid is a workable Dutch-oven substitute, but the temperature is guesswork. If you try it, use a heavy pan, keep the ash bed deep enough that no dough touches live coals, and check at 25 minutes.
- How much fruitA small frying pan or 9-inch deep pie plate takes about 3 cups of stewed fruit or applesauce. Drain very juicy fruit or thicken it with a spoonful of flour or cornstarch first; the recipe assumes the thick, well-cooked stewed fruit of a camp kitchen, not fresh berries in syrup.
- Crust thicknessHalf an inch of biscuit dough is deliberate here — thinner and it tears when you fold and lift it. Trim the overhang flush and crimp firmly with a fork, since an unsealed edge will let the filling boil out.
- Spice"If you have it" most likely means cinnamon, or a mix of cinnamon, nutmeg and a little clove; the recipe does not specify. About 1/2 teaspoon total over applesauce is enough.
- YieldA 9-inch pan serves four to six, best eaten warm within an hour or two. The bottom crust softens badly on standing, which is why this was made to be finished at the meal.
Biscuit dough as a pie crust is a camp and frontier expedient: baking powder biscuit needs no chilling, no marble slab and no lard kept cold, all of which are difficult over a fire. Recipes of this kind sit alongside the American tradition of cobblers, grunts, slumps and pandowdies, where stewed or dried fruit is baked under or between layers of quick bread rather than pastry; here applesauce is named as the best filling. Baking by burying a pan in hot ashes with a second heated pan as a lid is an old expedient that remained in use in outdoor cookery long after the cast-iron camp oven became available.