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Stanley Currant Pie
For each pie, take one cup fresh currants, mash with potato masher, add thre-quarters cup sugar. Take yolks of two eggs, beat to a froth; add one tablespoon flour very slowly, a little sugar and one tablespoon water. Beat this into the mashed currants; put in crust and bake. When baked, beat whites of eggs to stiff froth, add one and one-half tablespoons sugar, put over pie and set back in oven to brown. (Bake with only under crust).
A single-crust custard pie of the simplest kind, thickened with egg yolk and a spoonful of flour and finished with a meringue made from the leftover whites. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what a baked custard should look like.
- Currants means the fresh berryThese are fresh red or white currants on the bush, tart and juicy, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. Frozen currants, thawed and drained of nothing, work as well; dried ones will not.
- Sweetness is not negotiableThree-quarters cup sugar to one cup of currants sounds extreme until you taste raw currants, which are sharp enough to make the eyes water. Do not reduce it much or the filling will be aggressive.
- Quantities are per pie, and the pie is smallQuantities are per pie -- One cup of mashed fruit plus two yolks makes a shallow filling, closer to an 8-inch shell than a deep 9-inch one, so you may want half again as much for a larger pan. The recipe's opening phrase, "for each pie," is there to let a cook multiply the batch for several pies.
- Blind-bake the shellBake with only under crust -- This means no top and no lattice. As written the filling goes straight into the raw shell; if you want to guard against a soaked bottom you can line, weight and part-bake the shell first, though the recipe does not ask for it.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was common when ranges had no reliable thermometer or thermostat. A modern approach: start at 400F for the first 15 minutes, then drop to 325F and bake until the centre barely trembles, roughly 25 to 30 minutes more. Custard baked hot the whole way will curdle and weep.
- Adding the flour slowly mattersA tablespoon of flour beaten into frothed yolks will lump if dumped in. Sift it over in stages, and use the tablespoon of water to loosen the paste before it meets the fruit.
- The meringueTwo whites and the recipe's one and one-half tablespoons of sugar make a soft, old-style meringue, not the stiff sugar-heavy kind. Spread it so it touches the crust all round, which helps stop it shrinking, and brown it in the oven -- around 350F for 12 to 15 minutes -- rather than flashing it under a broiler.
- CoolingCool completely before cutting, at least three hours. Warm currant custard slumps. Refrigerate anything left over and eat within two days, as meringue on a custard base weeps quickly.
Currant pie belongs to the era when a kitchen garden or a hedgerow supplied the fruit rather than a shop. Red currants ripen in a brief midsummer window, are sharp enough that few people eat them out of hand, and are high in pectin and acid, which made them a staple of jellies, shrubs and pies in nineteenth-century American households. The construction here, a fruit puree bound with yolks and crowned with a meringue of the whites, follows the same economical logic as lemon meringue pie: nothing in the egg is wasted. "Stanley" may be the surname of a contributor, as community collections of this kind often credited recipes by name, but nothing in the recipe itself settles whether it is a person, a place or something else.