Blackberry Pie
Pick over and wash one and one-half cups berries. Stew until soft with enough water to prevent burning. Add sugar / to taste, and one-eighth teaspoon salt. Line plate with paste, put on a rim, fill with berries (which have been cooled); arrange six strips pastry across the top, cut same width as rim; put on an upper rim. Bake thirty minutes in moderate oven.
A pre-cooked fruit filling in a rimmed, strip-topped shell — the pastry is doing the baking here, not the fruit. A few of the terms belong to a turn-of-the-century kitchen rather than a modern one.
- "Plate" and "rim"The plate is a pie plate; period tins were often shallower and smaller than the deep 9-inch dish sold now, though the recipe gives no size. The "rim" is a narrow band of pastry laid around the moistened edge of the lower crust; the strips are trimmed to that same width and their ends are sealed under an upper rim, which finishes the border and hides the joins.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375°F by the usual modern equivalents; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Because the fruit is already stewed and cooled, thirty minutes is aimed only at setting and colouring the pastry — check the underside of the rim rather than the filling.
- Quantity of fruitOne and a half cups of raw berries cooks down to very little. For a modern 9-inch plate, expect a thin layer; the original suits a small shallow tin, and doubling the fruit is reasonable if you are using a deep dish.
- "Sugar to taste"Wild and cultivated blackberries vary enormously in acidity. Somewhere between a third and half a cup for this quantity is typical; sweeten the stewed fruit while it is hot, taste, and stop there.
- No thickenerThe recipe relies on the stewing to reduce the juice and gives no flour or cornstarch, so the filling will be loose and will run when cut. A teaspoon of cornstarch slaked in cold water, stirred into the fruit at the end of stewing, gives a filling that holds its shape without changing the flavour.
- Cooling the fruitThe instruction in parentheses is the hinge. Warm filling melts the fat in the raw bottom crust before the oven can set it, and the pastry turns grey and sodden. Cool the berries to room temperature at minimum, and cold is better.
- Blackberry seedsThe recipe leaves them in, which is authentic but hard going for some. Pressing half the stewed fruit through a sieve and returning it to the whole berries keeps the texture without the full seed load.
- YieldOne shallow pie; the recipe gives no yield, but this quantity of fruit will not stretch beyond a few modest wedges.
Blackberries were, for many nineteenth-century American households, generally a gathered rather than a bought fruit — picked from hedgerows and waste ground in late summer, which is why cookbooks of the period treat them as abundant and cheap and say little about where to get them. The construction here is worth noticing: a strip top with a built-up pastry rim is often said to have been a common treatment for a juicy fruit in a shallow tin, since the rim raised the wall a little and the open strips let steam escape instead of lifting the crust. Fannie Farmer took over the Boston Cooking School in the 1890s and her book, first published in 1896, is remembered chiefly for insisting on level, standardised measurements; a recipe like this one, with its "sugar to taste," shows that the older habit had not been driven out entirely where the cook's palate was the only sensible guide.