Currant Pie
1 cup currants. 1 cup sugar. 1/4 cup flour 2 egg yolks 2 tablespoons water Mix flour and sugar, add yolks of eggs slightly beaten and diluted with water. Wash currants, drain, remove stems, then measure; add to first mixture and bake in one crust; cool, and cover with Meringue I. Cook in slow oven until delicately browned.
A single-crust pie thickened with flour and egg yolk, then topped with a soft meringue — a common New England treatment for very tart fruit. The text as printed here is missing part of its ingredient list, so read the notes before shopping.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe printed fragment gives flour, egg yolks and water but no quantity for the sugar it tells you to mix in, and none for the currants it tells you to measure. In comparable single-crust berry pies of this book the proportions run to about 1 cup sugar and 1 1/2 cups fruit for a 9-inch shell; treat that as a reconstruction, not the author's figure.
- Currants means fresh red currantsThese are the translucent sour berries on strigs, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. Dried currants will not work in this filling — there is no liquid to rehydrate them and the sugar is calibrated to raw fruit acidity.
- Removing stemsThe recipe has you wash and drain before destemming, and measure after destemming, since stems occupy real volume.
- Bake in one crustThis means a single bottom crust, baked with the raw filling in it, not a prebaked shell. The recipe gives no temperature or time for this stage; something like a hot oven of around 400F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the center is visibly thickened rather than sloshing, is a modern reconstruction rather than the author's figure.
- Meringue IA cross-reference to the book's own soft meringue of egg whites beaten stiff with powdered sugar; check the quantities in that entry, as they are not reproduced here. Spread it so it touches the crust edge all the way around, which helps keep it from shrinking and weeping.
- A slow ovenConventionally rendered as roughly 300 to 325F; the book gives no figures. At that sort of heat the meringue needs something like 15 to 20 minutes to color delicately, and a hotter oven browns the peaks before the interior sets.
- Cool before meringueThe recipe directs you to cool the pie before covering it with Meringue I.
- YieldThe recipe states neither pan size nor yield; on the assumed 9-inch shell, one pie of about six modest servings. Meringue-topped fruit pies are best cut the day they are made.
Red currants were a standard dooryard fruit in nineteenth-century New England — hardy, prolific, and so sour that almost every use involved a great deal of sugar, which is why they turn up here beneath a meringue that offsets the acid. The flour-and-yolk binding is a custardy trick for thin, aggressive fruit: it sets the juice without a top crust to hold it in. Currant pie has largely disappeared from American home baking for a reason unconnected to taste. Ribes bushes host white pine blister rust, and from the 1910s onward federal and state eradication campaigns pulled out currant and gooseberry plantings across the pine-growing states; the fruit went from garden staple to a rarity. Cultivation is legal again in much of the country, but supply is seasonal and brief, and dried Zante currants — an entirely different fruit, a small dried grape — have quietly inherited the name. Bar-le-duc, incidentally, is the French preserve made from currants said by long tradition to be seeded by hand with a goose quill, a measure of how much labor the berry once justified.