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Green-Gage Pie
Roll out on a lightly floured table one pound pie paste in two separate, equal parts about the thickness of a fifty-cent piece at least. Lightly butter a pie plate, then line the plate with one of the parts of paste, press it well all around the edges and trim.
Remove the stones from a quart of green-gages, place them in a bowl, season with one ounce sugar and a teaspoon vanilla essence, mix well, then arrange them in the pie plate; lightly egg the edges all around, arrange the other layer of paste over and press both edges together all around. Make a few incisions on the surface, and with a hair pastry brush lightly glaze the top with beaten egg. Set to bake in the oven for thirty minutes, remove, dredge a little powdered sugar over and serve either hot or cold.
A professional chef's shorthand: no oven temperature, no thickener, and a sugar quantity that assumes ripe fruit. A few decisions have to be made for you.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Start at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 375F for the remaining time. Thirty minutes total is optimistic for a filled double-crust pie; expect 40 to 50 minutes, until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- Pastry thicknessA fifty-cent piece is a little under a tenth of an inch, and the recipe says "at least" that thick; call it a scant eighth of an inch. Sturdy by modern standards, which suits fruit that releases a lot of liquid.
- One pound of pie pasteThat is the total dough weight for both crusts, about 450 g, which is a modest allowance for a 9-inch plate and lighter than many modern double-crust recipes.
- A quart of greengagesRoughly 1 1/2 lb of whole fruit, or about 1 1/4 lb once stoned. Greengages are small round green-gold plums; if you cannot find them, any firm ripe plum works, though the flavor is less honeyed.
- One ounce of sugar is not enoughTwo tablespoons will suit only fully ripe, sweet fruit. Taste a plum first; underripe greengages want 1/3 to 1/2 cup, and the acidity of the skins is considerable.
- Add a thickenerThe recipe has none. Toss the fruit with 2 to 3 tablespoons of flour, or 2 tablespoons of cornstarch or quick tapioca, before filling.
- Vanilla essenceModern vanilla extract, and a full teaspoon is assertive with plums. Half a teaspoon, or a strip of lemon zest instead, lets the fruit speak.
- Hair pastry brush and dredgingAny soft brush does for the egg wash. "Dredge a little powdered sugar" means dust with confectioners' sugar, and it should go on after the pie has cooled slightly or it will simply dissolve.
- Yield and coolingSix to eight slices. Let it rest at least an hour before cutting; cut hot, the filling will not hold.
Greengages are a group of small, round, green-to-amber dessert plums, known in France as Reine Claude after Claude of France, consort of Francis I; in England the name is traditionally credited to the Gage family of Suffolk and their eighteenth-century plantings. They were prized in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a honeyed sweetness that survives cooking, which is why a chef could get away with an ounce of sugar to a quart of fruit. The instructions here read like kitchen dictation rather than domestic writing: a "hair pastry brush," the coin used as a gauge for pastry, the assumption that the cook knows how hot the oven should be. Such features suggest, though they do not establish, a book of the professional-restaurant kind, from a period when a fruit pie was expected to appear on a printed menu as unremarkably as a consomḿm.