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Plum Pie
Remove the stems from a pint of canned or fresh plums. Place them on a plate, dredge two tablespoons powdered sugar over them, mix well, then proceed to make the pie.
This is a filling note rather than a full recipe — it assumes you already have a two-crust pie in hand and only tells you how to prepare the fruit. A few things need filling in.
- A pint of plumsMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups, or roughly 1 lb of whole fruit. That fills one 9-inch pie shell thinly; a deeper modern pie would take more, perhaps 1½ lb.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period "powdered" usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either will dissolve into the fruit, but granulated is the closer match.
- Two tablespoons is not enoughTwo tablespoons may not be all the sugar intended -- the recipe sends you off to "proceed to make the pie," and the base pie recipe may add more. If it does not, tart plums — damsons especially — will want considerably more, somewhere in the range of ½ to ¾ cup for a pint of fruit; taste the raw fruit and adjust before it goes in the shell.
- The stonesThe instruction removes stems only. Plums baked whole with their stones in make a pie you have to eat carefully. Halve and pit them unless you mean to follow the older habit of leaving the eater to deal with the stones.
- Canned plumsDrain them thoroughly; if they are packed in syrup they are already sweetened, so cut the added sugar back accordingly. Wet fruit straight from the tin will flood the bottom crust.
- ThickeningPlums throw a great deal of juice. A tablespoon of flour or two teaspoons of cornstarch tossed with the sugar keeps the filling from running out at the vents.
- OvenThe recipe names no oven heat. Modern practice for a fruit pie of this kind is to start hot, around 425°F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to about 350°F for 35 to 45 minutes until the juices bubble thickly at the center.
- YieldOne 9-inch double-crust pie, six to eight servings. Cool at least two hours before cutting or the filling will not hold a slice.
Plum pie belongs to the older English fruit-pie tradition that came to America intact, where a "pie" meant fruit under a crust and needed no further explanation — which is exactly why this entry gives none. The instruction to dredge the fruit with sugar on a plate before filling the shell is a small piece of practical technique from the pre-refrigeration kitchen: sugaring the fruit briefly draws out juice and takes the raw edge off a sharp plum, of the kind common before large sweet dessert plums became widespread in markets. The alternative offered — "canned or fresh" — places the piece only loosely, since commercially canned fruit had been on sale in America from the mid-nineteenth century. What it does show is that a general cookbook could treat canned fruit as an ordinary substitute for the fresh article rather than a compromise, and pie recipes of the period routinely accommodate both.