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Currant Pie
Prepare the currants by removing the stalks, leaves and any unsound fruit; place them in a dish with sufficient caster-sugar to sweeten, and pour over a little boiling water. Put the dish in the oven to simmer for a few minutes, then take it out and cool. When the fruit is cold, pour it into a pie-dish, cover over with light puff paste, and bake in a moderate oven until done.
A single-crust deep pie of fresh red currants, given in the shorthand a professional kitchen could assume. The gaps worth filling are the fruit, the sugar and the oven.
- Which currantsThese are fresh red or white currants on the strig, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. If fresh currants are hard to find, frozen ones work and need no thawing before the pre-cooking step.
- Stripping the fruitRun the strigs through the tines of a fork over a bowl to strip the berries quickly. Removing every trace of stalk matters more here than with most fruit, since the stems are woody and stay so.
- Caster sugar and how muchCaster sugar is superfine granulated; ordinary granulated is fine in a cooked filling. "Sufficient to sweeten" is doing a lot of work: red currants are very tart, and about 3/4 to 1 cup sugar per 4 cups of fruit is the usual range. Taste the cooled fruit before it goes into the dish.
- The boiling water"A little" means a few tablespoons, only enough to start the juices. Currants are already wet and high in pectin, so more liquid than that gives you a filling that floods the crust.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually reckoned at about 325 to 350F. The recipe gives no heat for the preliminary simmering in the dish; a few minutes is all it asks, just until the skins begin to split.
- Cool the fruit completelyThis is the hinge. Warm filling melts the butter in puff paste before the oven can set the layers, and the pastry sinks instead of rising.
- Pie-dish and pasteA pie-dish is a deep oval or round baking dish, not a sloped American pie plate. The paste covers the top only; there is no bottom crust. Cut a vent, and bake 30 to 40 minutes until the pastry is deep gold and the juices bubble at the edge.
- Yield and servingA 1 1/2-quart dish serves six. Served warm with cream or a cold custard, in the manner of the period.
Currant pie of this kind is an English fruit-pie pattern transplanted whole: fruit in a deep dish, pastry over the top, no bottom crust, the sort of thing recorded in British household books through the nineteenth century. Oscar Tschirky, who presided over the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and lent his name to this collection, was compiling a working reference rather than teaching beginners, which is why the sugar is left to the cook's judgment and the oven to their experience. Red currants suited that kind of kitchen because they are naturally high in pectin and acid, so they set firmly without cornstarch or flour, and they were a common market fruit in the northeastern United States before white pine blister rust quarantines in the early twentieth century pushed Ribes cultivation out of many states, which is much of the reason the berry is unfamiliar to American cooks today.