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Cranberry Pie
Mrs. P.
Take Cranberries, pick and wash them in several waters, and put them in a dish with the juice of half a lemon, quarter pound of moist sugar or pounded loaf sugar, to a quart of Cranberries; cover it with puff paste or short crust, and bake it three-quarters of an hour. If short crust is used, draw it from the oven five minutes before it is done, and ice it; return it to the oven, and send it to the table cold.
A deep-dish pie with a top crust only, in the older English tart manner. Two things need attention: the sugar is low for modern palates, and there is no thickener at all.
- Sugar levelA quarter pound is about half a cup of sugar to a full pound of cranberries. That is bracingly tart by current standards; most modern cranberry pies use 1 to 1 1/2 cups for the same fruit. Taste the sweetened berries before covering them.
- Moist sugar and loaf sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar, still damp from the refinery. "Pounded loaf sugar" is granulated sugar, then sold as a hard cone and broken up at home. Either works; the brown sugar gives a darker, faintly molasses-edged filling.
- A quart of cranberriesMeasured whole, a quart is roughly 4 cups, or about 1 lb — a little more than one 12 oz supermarket bag. Frozen berries can go in unthawed.
- No thickenerThe recipe relies on the fruit's own pectin and a top crust to hold the juice. Cranberries release a great deal of liquid, so use a deep dish and expect a loose, saucy filling. A tablespoon of cornstarch or two of flour tossed with the sugar will set it if you want tidy slices.
- Bottom crustThere isn't one. The paste covers the dish only, as in a English fruit tart of the period. If you want a double crust, blind-bake the base or the juice will make it sodden.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven heat. Three-quarters of an hour works at about 350–375°F. Puff paste does better started hotter, around 425°F for the first 15 minutes, then dropped to 350°F for the remainder.
- "Ice it"This is not a poured glaze but the old sugar-and-egg-white icing: whisk one egg white to a froth, beat in about half a cup of sifted sugar, brush it over the pastry, and return the pie to the oven for five minutes so it sets to a crisp white crust. It contains raw egg white only briefly; the short bake dries rather than cooks it, so skip the icing if that matters to you.
- ServingSent to the table cold, as directed — the filling firms considerably as it cools. Serves six from a 9-inch deep dish.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago and first published in 1874 from recipes contributed by local women, with proceeds going to the Home for the Friendless; the contributor here is identified only by an initial, "Mrs. P.", and the mixed English vocabulary of her recipe — moist sugar, loaf sugar, short crust, puff paste — may point to a receipt copied out of an English book or brought over in a family's manuscript collection, though such terms were also current in American books of the period. The cranberry itself is thoroughly American: Vaccinium macrocarpon, a bog native of the northeast, was harvested wild long before commercial cultivation took hold on Cape Cod in the nineteenth century, and its keeping quality made it one of the few fresh fruits available for pies through a northern winter. English cooks knew a smaller relative and made cranberry tarts of much this kind, which may be why the dish arrives here as a lidded tart with an egg-white icing rather than as a double-crust pie.