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Sour Cream Pie
1/2 cup seeded raisins, chopped fine teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon cloves Pinch of nutmeg 1 cup sugar Yolks of 3 eggs White of 1 egg Bake like lemon custard, using whites of 2 eggs for top. Bake in an unbaked shell in a slow oven until custard is set, then beat whites of 2 eggs until stiff, and 2 tablespoons of sugar and spread on top after pie is baked and brown in oven. Puddings and Sauces 2 cups flour APPLE PUDDING (STEAMED) 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon butter 2/3 cup milk 3 or 4 apples cut in slices Mix flour, baking powder and salt together and sift twice. Work in butter with tips of fingers and add milk. Line bottom and sides of a well buttered mold with sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg.
Steam 1 hour and 20 minutes. Serve with cream sauce. NOTE-Any other fruit desired may be used.
Two recipes have run together here, and both have lost lines in the original printing: the pie's list omits the sour cream that gives it its name, and the pudding's instruction for lining the mold breaks off mid-sentence. What follows is what can be said reliably about each.
- The missing sour creamThe ingredient list as printed has no sour cream in it, though the title calls for it. A cup of thick sour cream to three yolks and a cup of sugar is the proportion often quoted for pies of this type, but nothing in the text states it. Modern cultured sour cream is thicker and more acidic than naturally soured farm cream, which may affect how the custard sets.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is 300-325F. Custard pies want that low range throughout; above about 350F the yolks curdle and weep liquid into the crust.
- Knowing when the custard is setPull the pie when the outer two inches are firm and the center still trembles as a single mass. It continues cooking out of the oven. A knife inserted at the edge should come out clean.
- The meringueTwo whites to two tablespoons of sugar is lean by current standards, which generally use about two tablespoons of sugar per white. Spread it while the filling is still hot and seal it to the crust edge all the way around, then brown briefly in a hotter oven.
- Egg leftoversThe filling calls for three yolks and one white, the topping for two whites. That accounts for three eggs exactly, which is clearly the intent.
- Calumet Baking PowderA brand name, still made, and double-acting. Any modern double-acting baking powder works one for one; three level teaspoons to two cups flour is a generous but period-correct amount for a steamed dough.
- The pudding's lost lineThe text jumps from lining the buttered mold to sugar, salt and nutmeg with no explanation. The sense of similar steamed puddings is that the biscuit dough lines the mold, the sliced apples go in the middle mixed with the sugar and spices, and dough closes the top. Treat the quantity of sugar as unspecified; half a cup suits four apples.
- SteamingAn hour and twenty minutes in a covered mold set on a rack in a pot of simmering water, the water reaching halfway up the mold. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- YieldNo yield or pan size is given. The filling would suit roughly one nine-inch shell, and the pudding perhaps six servings.
Sour cream raisin pie belongs to the thrift baking of the northern Plains and the upper Midwest, where cream soured naturally in the crock before refrigeration and raisins were one of the few fruits a household could count on in late winter. The spicing here, cinnamon with cloves and a little nutmeg, is the same combination used in mincemeat and in raisin pie generally. The pie is still strongly associated with Mennonite and Scandinavian-American communities. The name funeral pie is chiefly a Pennsylvania Dutch one for plain raisin pie, and the explanation usually offered for it, that such a pie keeps well and can be built entirely from pantry staples on short notice, is itself folk tradition. The Calumet brand name in the pudding recipe points to the era when baking powder companies distributed recipe collections to promote their own tins, a common form of cookbook publishing from the 1890s onward, though naming the brand does not make the book a Calumet publication.