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Green Currant Pie
Line an inch pie-dish with good pie-crust, sprinkle over the bottom two heaping table-spoons sugar and two of flour (or one of corn starch) mixed; then pour in one pint green currants washed clean, and two table-spoons currant jelly; sprinkle with four heaping table-spoons sugar, and add two table-spoons cold water; cover and bake fifteen or twenty minutes. - Miss S. Alice Melching.
A simple two-crust fruit pie built directly in the shell, with no pre-cooking of the filling. The one thing worth adjusting is the bake time.
- Bake time is far too shortFifteen or twenty minutes will not set a raw double-crust fruit pie or cook the bottom pastry. Expect 45 to 55 minutes at 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 375F until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- Green currantsThese are underripe currants, picked firm and very tart, once common in July gardens. Fresh currants of any kind are hard to find at supermarkets; look to farmers' markets or frozen. Ripe red currants work but are sweeter, so cut the sugar by a tablespoon or two.
- Total sugarSix heaping tablespoons plus the jelly is roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup for a pint of fruit. That is calibrated to genuinely sour green fruit; taste and judge.
- ThickenerTwo tablespoons flour or one of cornstarch, scattered under the fruit, is on the light side for currants, which run juicy. Cornstarch gives a clearer set; increase to a scant two tablespoons if the fruit is very ripe.
- "An inch pie-dish"Most likely a shallow plate about an inch deep rather than a deep-dish one; the recipe gives no diameter. A pint of fruit fills such a dish thinly.
- Cover"Cover" means a top crust. Cut vents, and set the pie on a rimmed sheet, since currant juice boils over readily.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six modest slices. Cool at least two hours before cutting or the filling will run.
Currants were a staple of American kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century, valued because the bushes bore reliably and the fruit had enough acid and natural pectin to make jelly without help. The green, unripe fruit was used for pies precisely because it was sharp and firm, in the same spirit as green gooseberry or green grape pie. The spoonful of currant jelly here puts preserved fruit to a second use, adding body and flavor. Domestic currant growing declined sharply in the early twentieth century when several states restricted Ribes plantings as a host of white pine blister rust, which is much of why the fruit is unfamiliar to American cooks today. The Dixie Cook Book, like many regional compilations of the 1880s, credits contributors by name, and Miss Melching's pie is typical of the short, assumed-knowledge style those household submissions took.