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Fruit Pie
Mix half a tablespoonful of arrow-root with a little cold water until smooth and put it into a lined saucepan with one pint of juice from any kind of canned fruit, sweeten to taste with powdered sugar, and stir it over the fire with a wooden spoon until boiling and thickened. Put about two breakfast cupfuls of canned fruit and juice into a pie-dish and pour the thickened juice over it. Put one teacupful of well-washed rice into a saucepan with a pint and a half of milk, and boil it until reduced to a pulp. Beat two eggs with three tablespoonfuls of granulated sugar, and stir them in with the rice when it is cooked. Spread the rice out onto a dish and leave it until cool, then work it up with a little flour; mould it into a flat cake that will just fit in the pie-dish, lay it on top of the fruit, brush it over with a paste-brush dipped in beaten egg, and bake in a brisk oven until browned. It may be served either hot or cold.
A fruit pie with a rice crust rather than pastry — closer to a baked pudding than a pie, and the rice lid is where the whole thing succeeds or fails.
- The rice lidThe rice must be cooked to a genuine pulp and then cooled completely before it is worked with flour, or it will not hold a shape. Add flour a spoonful at a time — just enough to make a stiff, patted-out cake about the diameter of your dish — since too much turns the topping tough and pasty.
- "Lined saucepan"A pan lined with tin or enamel rather than bare copper or iron, so the acid in the fruit juice would not react with the metal. Any stainless or enamelled pan does the same job.
- Cup measuresThese old measures vary; a teacupful is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup and a breakfast cupful at 8 to 10 fl oz. On that reckoning the filling is roughly two to two and a half cups of canned fruit with its syrup, and the rice about 3/4 cup dry to 3 cups milk (the pint and a half called for).
- Brisk ovenA hot oven, roughly 400-425F. The filling and rice are already cooked, so the bake is only about browning the egg-washed top; start checking at about 20 minutes.
- ArrowrootHalf a tablespoon to a pint of juice gives a light, clear gloss rather than a firm set, which is the point: arrowroot stays translucent where flour would cloud it. It thickens the moment it boils and thins again if held at a boil, so take it off the heat as soon as it turns.
- SweeteningCanned fruit in heavy syrup needs very little added sugar; fruit in juice or water needs more. Taste the thickened juice before it goes over the fruit; the only other sugar in the dish is the three tablespoonfuls beaten with the eggs into the rice.
- YieldThe recipe does not specify the size of the pie-dish or how many it serves; the quantities suit a small to medium dish. Served cold it slices cleanly; hot, it behaves like a spoonable pudding.
Rice-topped and rice-crusted fruit puddings turn up often in nineteenth-century kitchens, where rice and milk could stand in for butter and flour -- a pastry-less pie built on a cheap storeroom staple. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a reminder that The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf is not a record of Waldorf-Astoria restaurant cookery so much as a vast general compendium of some nine hundred pages, gathering plain household dishes alongside hotel showpieces. The reliance on canned fruit suits the date: by the 1890s commercially canned peaches, cherries and berries were cheap and widely available enough that a cookbook could assume a shelf of them.