Mock Cherry Pie
Mix one cup cranberries cut in halves, one-half cup raisins seeded and cut in pieces, three-fourths cup sugar, and one tablespoon flour. Dot over with one teaspoon butter. Bake between crusts.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to line and cover a pie plate. The two things it leaves out are the oven temperature and the pan size.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven temperature or time at all. A workable modern equivalent for a double-crust fruit pie is a hot start and a longer moderate finish: about 425F for 15 minutes, then 350F for 30 to 35 more, until the juices bubble thickly through the vents. Cranberries need real time to break down; pulling the pie when the crust colors leaves them raw and squeaky.
- Yield is smallOne cup of cranberries and half a cup of raisins fills a shallow 8-inch plate thinly. For a modern 9-inch pie plate, double the filling and keep the proportions as written.
- Seeded raisinsRaisins of this period commonly still contained seeds, which had to be split out by hand; the recipe's "seeded" is that step. Seedless raisins or sultanas need only be chopped roughly, which is what "cut in pieces" is asking for.
- No added liquidNo water is called for. Halved cranberries release plenty of juice, and the single tablespoon of flour plus the fruit's own pectin should be enough to set it. Adding liquid gives you a soupy pie.
- Cut the berries, don't whizz themHalving each cranberry by hand is the point of the dish: the cut halves sit in the syrup looking like stoned cherries. A food processor turns them to pulp and the illusion goes.
- SweetnessThree-quarters cup sugar to one cup cranberries is not excessive here, given how sour the fruit is, but taste the mixture before it goes in. Frozen cranberries work, though let them soften enough to halve cleanly.
- CrustVent the top crust or use lattice; this filling produces a lot of steam. A rimmed baking sheet underneath saves scrubbing when it boils over.
"Mock" dishes run all through nineteenth-century American cookery — mock turtle soup, mock oysters, mock apple pie — and they are usually about substituting something cheap and on hand for something costly or out of season. Sour cherries had a short summer window and did not keep; cranberries, harvested in the New England bogs in autumn, held for months in a cold cellar, and raisins were a year-round pantry staple. Halved and baked together, the two give the tartness, color and rough shape of a cherry pie in the dead of winter, which is why the recipe sits comfortably in a Boston book. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) is famous for standardizing level measurements, and the terseness here is characteristic: she assumes the reader has already learned pastry from the general directions earlier in the chapter.