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Cranberry Pie
Plunge one quart of cranberries into a pan of cold water, salted, and let them stand for twelve hours, when they will need to be washed in several waters to remove the salt flavor. Then take them out, drain and put on a cloth to dry. Pick them over carefully and put into a basin with four ounces of caster-sugar and the juice of half a lemon squeezed over them. Stir together well and, if thought desirable, add a wineglassful of any white wine. Fill up a pie-dish with the fruit, cover over the top with a light paste, put the pie in the oven, and bake until done. Sprinkle over powdered sugar, and serve either hot or cold.
A single-crust cranberry pie of the plainest sort, with one instruction that no modern cook would recognize. A few notes before you begin.
- The salt soakTwelve hours in cold salted water followed by repeated rinsing was a period trick said to draw out some of the harshness of raw cranberries. It does nothing a modern cook needs and risks a faintly saline crust if the rinsing is careless. Skip it, or if you want to try it, use about a tablespoon of salt per quart of water and rinse in at least three changes.
- Quantity of fruitA quart of cranberries is roughly 14 to 16 oz by weight, or a standard 12 oz bag plus a little. That fills a 9-inch pie dish generously, since the berries collapse as they cook.
- SugarFour ounces of caster sugar is about half a cup, which for raw cranberries is markedly tart by current tastes. Most cooks today would use 3/4 to 1 full cup, and the finished pie is still sharp. Caster sugar is superfine sugar; ordinary granulated works, and dissolves fine in the oven's heat.
- A wineglassfulIn this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, not the 6 oz pour of a modern glass. Any dry or off-dry white will do; it mostly adds acidity and aroma, and the alcohol cooks off.
- Light pasteThis is a top crust only, laid over the fruit in the dish, not a lined pie. "Light paste" means a short or puff-style pastry rather than a heavy suet or hot-water crust. Cut vents; cranberries throw off a great deal of steam and juice.
- Oven and timeOscar gives none. Bake at 425F for 15 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then drop to 375F for another 30 to 35 minutes, until the juices bubble thickly at the vents.
- The juice problemWith no thickener at all, the filling will be loose and soupy hot. Serving it cold, as the recipe permits, lets it set somewhat; a tablespoon of cornstarch or flour tossed with the sugar gives a sliceable pie if that matters to you.
- Finishing and yield'Powdered sugar' in this period often meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than what we now call confectioners' sugar; either can be dusted over the baked crust. Serves six to eight.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a working record of what a large American hotel kitchen actually turned out, and cranberry pie belongs to its plainest, most domestic stratum — a New England fruit pie that predates the Waldorf by generations. Cranberries were one of the few native North American fruits to enter the commercial food supply early and stay there; the bogs of Cape Cod and New Jersey were being cultivated on a serious scale by the mid-nineteenth century, and barrels of berries kept well enough through winter that the pie was a cold-weather standby long before it became a Thanksgiving fixture. The long salting is the curious survival here. Soaking or scalding sour fruit in salted water appears in a number of nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks, usually with the claim that it removes bitterness or "crudeness"; the practice was traditional rather than tested. The splash of white wine, on the other hand, appears in the recipe only as an optional addition.