Raisin Pie
One cup seeded raisins, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 teaspoon vinegar. Cook raisins in enough cold water for one pie; add tablespoon butter; mix all together. Bake in two crusts.
A bare-bones early-1900s pie filling, written for a cook who already knew what raisin pie should look like. The gaps worth filling are the liquid, the thickener and the oven.
- "Enough cold water for one pie"Genuinely ambiguous. In practice, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups for a cup of raisins, simmered until they plump and the liquid reduces to a syrup that just coats them. Filling a raw bottom crust with thin liquid is what makes the base soggy.
- No thickener is listedMany period raisin pies bind the syrup with a spoonful of flour or cornstarch, and this one will run without it. Cook the raisins down hard, or slurry a rounded tablespoon of flour with a little cold water and stir it in at the end.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" in 1900 meant raisins from which the seeds had been removed by hand or machine — muscatels, typically, fleshier and more perfumed than what we buy now. Ordinary seedless raisins (Thompsons) substitute directly; a mix with a few muscat or golden raisins gets closer to the original flavour.
- One tablespoon of sugarThat is very little; the raisins carry most of the sweetness. If your raisins are dry or dull, two or three tablespoons will not unbalance it.
- The vinegarThe recipe says only "vinegar"; cider vinegar is the likeliest household default. It does the job lemon juice does in a modern raisin pie — it cuts the flat sweetness of cooked dried fruit. Do not leave it out, and do not increase it.
- ButterThe recipe simply says to add it and mix. Stirring it in off the heat, after cooking, keeps it in suspension in the syrup. A tablespoon for a single pie.
- "Bake in two crusts"A double-crust pie: bottom shell, filling, top crust vented or latticed, edges sealed. No size is given; assume a modest 8- or 9-inch tin. The book assumes you have pastry already made.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Start hot, 425F for about 15 minutes to set the bottom pastry, then drop to 350F for another 25 to 30 minutes until the crust is browned and the filling bubbles at the vents. Cool completely before cutting or the filling will slump.
- YieldOne pie of 8 or 9 inches, six to eight slices, though a cup of raisins makes a shallow filling at the larger size. The quantities scale cleanly if you want two.
Raisin pie earned the nickname "funeral pie" among the Pennsylvania Dutch, traditionally explained by the fact that raisins keep indefinitely in the pantry and a pie could be assembled at short notice for a houseful of mourners without a trip to market. By the same account it is a winter and early-spring pie, made when there is no fresh fruit and no home-canned fruit left, out of ingredients that sit on a shelf. The very short ingredient list here — raisins, a spoonful of sugar, vinegar, butter — is characteristic of the whole "reliable recipes" genre, which offers a reminder rather than an instruction.