Spices
1 cup raisins, seeded and chopped 1/2 cup butter 2 eggs well beaten Mix ingredients in order given, adding spices to taste. Bake between crusts. This quantity will make two pies.
This is a raisin pie filling of the older mincemeat-adjacent sort, and the printed ingredient list is plainly short — read it as a skeleton rather than a complete formula.
- The list is incomplete as printedRaisins, butter and eggs alone will not fill two pies, and there is no sugar, liquid or thickener named. Many raisin pies of the same general period add sugar, water or cider, a little flour or cracker crumbs, and lemon juice or vinegar for sharpness. Treat the quantities given as the core and build around them from a current raisin pie recipe.
- "Two pies" means small onesOlder pie plates were generally shallow and often smaller than a modern deep dish. Split between two of them, this filling is thin; in a single 9-inch deep dish it is closer to right, and even then it wants the additional bulk noted above.
- "Spices to taste"For raisins this usually means cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and sometimes allspice. A teaspoon of cinnamon with a half teaspoon each of nutmeg and cloves per two pies is a reasonable starting point; cloves dominate quickly.
- Seeded raisinsMuscat raisins came with seeds, and seeding them was often hand work. Modern seedless raisins go straight in. Chopping still matters — whole raisins slide around and leave the filling loose.
- ButterHalf a cup is one stick, 4 oz. It is not creamed here; it can be melted and stirred in, or cut small and dotted over the filling before the top crust goes on.
- OvenBake a double-crust pie at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and brown the bottom pastry, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 35 minutes. Cut vents; an egg-and-raisin filling steams hard.
- CoolingAn egg-thickened fruit filling sets as it cools. Cut it hot and it runs. Give it at least two hours.
Raisin pie was a staple of the American cold months, when dried fruit was what the pantry had and fresh fruit was what it did not. It travels under several names — funeral pie in Pennsylvania German households, where it was made because the ingredients kept on the shelf and could be assembled at short notice for a houseful of mourners, though that association is traditional rather than documented in the early cookbooks. The version here, bound with egg and enriched with butter rather than set with flour and water alone, sits between plain raisin pie and mincemeat, which by 1900 was increasingly made without meat and turning into a spiced fruit filling, though meat-based versions persisted well beyond that date. The vagueness of "spices to taste" and the missing sugar are conspicuous — a reminder that even the most systematic of the period's cookbooks still assumed a cook who knew what a pie was supposed to contain.