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Cherry Pie
Remove the stones from the necessary amount of cherries and then scald the fruit in their own juice, sweeten well, and pour into a deep pie-dish lined with a rich paste. Dredge with flour, cover with a top crust of the same paste, ornament the edge, and put in the oven to bake.
Oscar assumes the cook knows pastry and knows her oven; what he gives is the handling of the fruit. The points below fill in the numbers he left out.
- Quantity"The necessary amount" for a 9-inch deep dish is about 2 lb of sour cherries, roughly 5-6 cups pitted. Sweet cherries work but need lemon juice for balance.
- Scalding in their own juicePitted cherries release liquid readily; heat them gently until the juice runs and just steams, no more, then sweeten as Oscar directs. This drives off some water so the finished pie is not a flood, and it is a step many modern recipes leave out in favour of a raw filling.
- Sweetening"Sweeten well" for sour cherries means roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups sugar per 2 lb of fruit; taste the hot juice, since the acidity of the fruit varies enormously.
- Dredge with flourThis is the thickener, sprinkled over the filling in the dish rather than stirred in. Two to three tablespoons of flour is the working amount; cornstarch or tapioca gives a clearer set if you prefer it.
- Rich pasteIn a kitchen of this period this most likely means a butter or butter-and-lard short crust rather than a puff pastry. Keep it cold and vent the top crust, which Oscar does not mention but which the steam requires.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Start at 425F for 20 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for a further 30-40 minutes, until the juice bubbles thickly through the vents.
- Rest before cuttingCherry filling thickened with flour needs at least two hours at room temperature to set. Cut hot and it will run.
- YieldOne deep 9-inch pie, six to eight servings.
Cherry pie was already a fixed point of American baking long before Oscar Tschirky put it in print; sour cherries, especially the Montmorency type, were the classic pie fruit precisely because they hold their acidity and shape under heat where sweet cherries collapse. What is telling here is the brevity. Oscar's book seems to have been written for a readership that expected the Waldorf's authority, and his contribution is the professional detail: scald the fruit in its own juice first, sweeten to taste while it is hot, and thicken by dredging flour over the filling rather than mixing it through. The recipe also reflects a kitchen working with fresh seasonal fruit and, one presumes, a range whose heat the cook judged by hand, which may be why no temperature and no baking time appear at all.