Home › Pastry, Pies and Tarts › Cherry Pie
Cherry Pie
The common red cherries are the best for pies.
Stone the cherries or not as desired, line deep pie plates with good plain paste, nearly fill them with the cherries, sprinkle four large tablespoons of sugar over each pie, and dredge lightly with flour. Cover each pie with an upper crust, which should be rolled as thin as possible; make a vent in the center, and press the edges lightly together so the juices will not escape during the baking. Serve the pies the same day they are baked, else the under-crust will become heavy. Sprinkle powdered sugar over each pie just before sending to table.
Follow the same directions in using any small fruit for pies.
A plain fruit pie of the kind that assumes you already know how to handle pastry. The gaps worth filling are the fruit, the thickener and the oven, none of which the original specifies.
- "Common red cherries"These are sour cherries — Montmorency or similar — not the sweet dark Bing types sold fresh in most supermarkets. Sour cherries are worth seeking out frozen or jarred; if you substitute sweet cherries, cut the sugar and add lemon juice, or the filling will taste flat.
- StoningThe recipe leaves it optional. Pit them; a pitter or a sturdy hairpin will do it.
- SugarFour large tablespoons per pie is restrained for sour cherries. Modern palates generally want 3/4 to 1 cup for a nine-inch pie of pie cherries; taste the raw fruit and judge.
- The flour dredge"Dredge lightly" is the only thickener here, and it is not enough for the volume of juice sour cherries release. Reckon on 3 to 4 tablespoons of flour, or 2 to 3 of cornstarch, tossed through the fruit rather than scattered on top.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Start at 425F for the first 20 minutes to set the bottom crust and crisp the pastry, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes, until juice bubbles thickly through the vent. Thin, watery bubbling means the starch has not yet cooked out.
- Deep plates and thin top crustA deep pie plate — closer to two inches than one — is what the volume of fruit assumes. Roll the upper crust as thin as the recipe asks, and cut the central vent as directed.
- SealingPressing the edges lightly is optimistic given how much liquid sour cherries throw. Crimp firmly, and set the pie on a rimmed sheet to catch the overflow that will happen anyway.
- Serve the same daySound advice, and still true: the under-crust absorbs juice overnight. Cool the pie at least three hours before cutting so the filling sets, then serve within the day.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or plate size; reckon on roughly one nine-inch deep pie, six to eight servings.
Cherry pie belongs to the American summer-fruit tradition of pies made from whatever the orchard gave up in a short window, which is why the recipe ends by telling the cook to treat any small fruit the same way — the method mattered more than the fruit. The Montmorency and Morello sour cherries meant here were common dooryard trees; they are too sharp to eat out of hand and were grown specifically for cooking and preserving, a distinction that has largely dropped out of the modern market. The recipe is generally traced to the Butterick Publishing Company, a pattern and fashion house, and its cook book is usually dated to around the turn of the twentieth century. The instruction to serve the pie the day it is baked is given in the recipe itself as a matter of the under-crust, and "before sending to table" was a stock cookbook phrase of the period.