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Deep Fruit Pies
Fruit pies in deep dishes, such as made by the English and French, are preferable to ordinary fruit pie, because you obtain more juice and fruit. The best method of making these is as follows: Take a deep, oval pie dish (china, not tin), line the edge with paste, also about half its depth inside. Now invert a small cup in center (an egg cup is best), and one that will stand a little above the edge of the dish; next fill the dish with fruit, then add a little water if the fruit has not much juice. Some fruits, such as currants and raspberries, have enough juice. Also add sugar to taste; now cover this with a crust of short paste, wash it with water, or white of an egg, and dust with powdered sugar. Make a few fancy cuts on it before baking, and after it is washed and sugared do not cut too deep. These cuts give a rich looking appearance. The cup in the center collects the juice, and if the whole of the pie is not eaten at one meal, what is left can be supplied with juice by simply lifting up the cup and allowing the juice to escape. The edge of this pie, to be artistic, should be pinched with the finger and thumb, then notched with a knife. If you use fruit which gives too much juice, you can prevent the boiling over by mixing a little flour with the sugar, about one teaspoonful of flour to twelve of sugar.
This is the English deep-dish fruit pie: no bottom crust, a lot of fruit, and a single lid of pastry. Most of the technique translates directly, but the book assumes a few things a modern cook no longer takes for granted.
- The inverted cup is the hingeAn upturned egg cup or small ceramic cup in the centre holds the lid up off the fruit and gives the boiling juice somewhere to go instead of forcing the crust off. A ceramic pie funnel ("pie bird") does the same job; either must be ovenproof and must stand slightly proud of the dish rim so it supports the pastry.
- Why china, not tinA deep oval china or stoneware dish is what the pastry edge is stuck to. The book gives no reason for the preference; tin conducts faster, the sugary juice is more apt to catch, and thin tinware was often said to taint acid fruit. A modern ceramic or glass oval baker of about 1.5 to 2 quarts is a reasonable substitute.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake hot enough to set and colour the lid — 425F for the first 15 to 20 minutes, then 375F for another 25 to 35 minutes until the juice bubbles up around the funnel. The pastry is the only thing that needs the heat; the fruit only has to soften.
- "Short paste"Plain shortcrust, not puff: roughly 2 parts flour to 1 part fat by weight, bound with ice water, is a serviceable modern reading. You will need enough for the lid plus paste to cover the rim and run down inside the dish to about half its depth, as the book directs. That lining is what the lid is sealed to; wet it before laying the lid on.
- The glazeWater or egg white brushed on, then dusted with powdered sugar, gives a crackled frosted finish rather than the glossy egg-yolk shine of a savoury pie. The book cuts its fancy patterns after washing and sugaring, and warns against cutting too deep.
- Thickening ratioOne teaspoon of flour to twelve of sugar works out to about 1 tablespoon of flour to 3/4 cup of sugar. That is a light hand by modern standards and deliberately so: this pie is meant to be juicy. For very wet fruit, cornstarch at half the volume gives a clearer set.
- Sugar "to taste"For a 2-quart dish, figure roughly 3/4 to 1 cup for tart fruit such as currants, gooseberries or sour cherries, and 1/3 to 1/2 cup for ripe plums, blackberries or apples. Toss it with the fruit rather than layering it on top.
- Yield and servingA dish this size serves six to eight. Serve warm rather than hot — the juice under the crust is scalding straight from the oven — with cream, as the English do.
The deep dish fruit pie is the standard English form: fruit heaped in a china dish with a single pastry lid over it, no bottom crust at all, which is why the writer promises "more juice and fruit" than the double-crusted American pie. The little inverted cup does the work later taken over by the ceramic pie funnel, moulded in some versions into the blackbird shape sold as a "pie bird" — the four-and-twenty blackbirds of the nursery rhyme are usually credited with the design, though that connection is traditional rather than documented. That the book should hold up the English and French method as "preferable" says something about the period's cookery writing, which regularly measured domestic practice against European models. The advice to notch the pinched edge with a knife and score shallow patterns in the sugared lid belongs to the same impulse: pastry as something looked at before it is eaten.