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Raisin Pie
Place a pound California seeded raisins in a bowl, add an ounce sugar, a half teaspoon cinnamon in powder and teaspoon vanilla essence, mix well, then proceed to make pie.
This is a filling formula rather than a full recipe -- the book assumes you already know how to line a plate with pastry. A few things need filling in before it will work.
- What is missingThere is no liquid, no thickener and no crust instruction. As written the raisins bake dry and the sugar scorches. A pound of raisins wants roughly a cup of water or fruit juice and a tablespoon of flour or two teaspoons of cornstarch stirred in, simmered until it thickens before it goes into the shell.
- "Seeded" raisinsSeeded means the seeds have been removed by machine from a seed-bearing grape, usually a Muscat -- fleshy, sticky and strongly perfumed. Seedless raisins, the Thompson type on every supermarket shelf, are what you will actually buy. They are smaller and less musky, so the pie is milder.
- Plump them firstPour boiling water over the raisins and let them stand twenty minutes, or bring them to a simmer in water for five. Dry raisins pull moisture out of the filling and out of the bottom crust.
- Only an ounce of sugarThat is about two tablespoons for a whole pound of fruit -- restrained by the pie standards of the period and still restrained now, since raisins carry their own sweetness. Add a tablespoon of lemon juice or cider vinegar; the acid does more for the flavour than more sugar would.
- Vanilla essenceEssence and extract are the same thing here. A teaspoon in a single pie is assertive; add it off the heat, after the filling has thickened, so it does not cook away.
- OvenA raisin pie wants a hot start to set the bottom crust -- 425F for the first fifteen minutes, then down to 350F for another twenty-five to thirty until the top is browned. Vent the lid or it will split.
- YieldA pound of raisins fills one generous nine-inch double-crust pie, six to eight slices.
Raisin pie belongs to the long tradition of pies built from what keeps: dried fruit on the shelf when there is nothing fresh in the garden. In Pennsylvania German households the version made with plumped raisins is known as rosina pie and, traditionally, as "funeral pie," because the ingredients could be had at any season and at short notice when a household had to feed mourners. The specification of California raisins here is a period marker. By the 1910s the San Joaquin Valley dominated the American raisin trade, and cookbook writers named the origin the way one might now specify a variety of apple. The phrasing is terse -- "then proceed to make pie" -- recording the filling and leaving basic pastry to the reader.