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Ripe Currant Pie
One cup mashed ripe currants, one of sugar, two table-spoons water, one of flour beaten with the yolks of two eggs; bake, frost the top with the beaten whites of the eggs and two table-spoons powdered sugar, and brown in oven. - Mrs. W. E. H.,
A single-crust custard-style pie in the older idiom: the book assumes you already have pastry in hand and are only being told what goes in it. The quantities are small, and the whole thing hinges on the flour-and-yolk binding.
- The crust is assumedNo shell is specified in the receipt itself; a reader of the period would have taken the pastry from a plain paste recipe elsewhere in the book. Use one 8- or 9-inch bottom crust, no top.
- Reading the measures"Two table-spoons water, one of flour" means one tablespoon of flour, beaten with the two egg yolks into a slurry. That single tablespoon plus the yolks is the entire thickener for a cup of fruit and a cup of sugar, so the set is soft and spoonable rather than sliceable-clean.
- CurrantsFresh currants, stripped from their strigs and crushed; most likely red, though the receipt does not specify colour. Not the dried Zante "currants" sold for fruitcake, which are grapes. Fresh currants are seasonal and often easier to find frozen; thaw and drain lightly before mashing so the filling is not watery.
- The sugar is not optionalA cup of sugar to a cup of currants looks heavy until you taste raw red currants, which are on the order of 2 to 3 percent acid. Cutting the sugar much below three-quarters of a cup is likely to give a filling many will find sharp.
- Oven temperatureBake the filled shell at 350F until the center is just set and barely wobbles, roughly 30 to 40 minutes. Blind-baking the shell for 10 minutes first helps, since this filling is wet.
- Browning the meringue"Brown in oven" means a short pass, not a second bake: spread the whites over the hot filling so they meet no cold surface, and give them 10 to 15 minutes at 325F, or 5 minutes at 400F if you want more color and less drying.
- Two whites, two tablespoons sugarThat is a lean meringue by modern standards, where roughly two tablespoons of sugar per white is the usual proportion. Expect a soft, foamy topping rather than a stiff bakery meringue, and one that may weep on standing.
- YieldOne shallow pie, six modest slices. It is best eaten the day it is made; the meringue and the soft custard both suffer overnight.
Red currants were a fixture of American kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century, hardy, prolific, and ripening in a short early-summer window that pushed cooks to use them fast in jelly, shrub, and pies like this one. Their commercial decline came later, when currants and gooseberries were identified as alternate hosts for white pine blister rust and several states restricted or banned planting them in the early twentieth century, which is a large part of why the fruit is unfamiliar to American cooks today while it remained common in Europe. The construction here a fruit purée bound with yolks and a spoonful of flour, then crowned with the leftover whites is thrift as much as technique: nothing of the egg is wasted, and the meringue does double duty as topping and as a way to temper the fruit's acidity. The attribution to "Mrs. W. E. H." marks it as a contributed receipt, the compiled-community format that built The Dixie Cook Book and hundreds of like volumes.