Home › Pastry and Cookies › Double Crust Pie
Double Crust Pie
Fit the lower crust as for single crust pie, but do not build up edge. Have the upper crust rolled out before filling is put in, or else lower crust will become soaked and soggy. The upper crust should be rolled a little larger than needed. The filling should not be piled high, but levelled to avoid cooking over while baking. Moisten the edge of the upper and lower crust with water when the edges are being fluted. The upper crust should always be perforated, so that the steam may escape. Attractive designs may be cut out with a knife or a pastry jagger. The perforated upper crust should be placed loosely and not stretched over the filling. For a juicy filling, add a small amount of flour to the sugar to prevent the juice escaping from the pie. Sometimes for berry pies, the lower crust is folded over the upper crust, thus making a thick three-layer edge to prevent the escape of the filling. Another way of keeping the juice from boiling out is to brush the bottom of the lower crust with white of egg. Double crust pies usually take between 40 and 50 minutes for baking and require an oven temperature of about 450°F. until crust is brown then 350°F. 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1¼ cups warm water
This is a method entry rather than a formula: it assumes you already have pastry and a filling, and tells you how to put them together. Everything here still holds, with a few clarifications.
- The stray line at the end"2 tablespoons cornstarch, 1½ cups warm water" belongs to a neighbouring recipe or to a general thickening note and has drifted onto this page in printing. It is not part of the assembly instructions; ignore it unless you are thickening a fruit filling, in which case use the ratio your own filling recipe gives.
- The hinge: roll the top crust firstThe single instruction that matters most is the one given first. Once wet filling sits in an unbaked shell, the bottom starts hydrating immediately; a five-minute pause to roll the lid is enough to produce a pale, damp base. Have the top rolled and resting on a floured sheet before the filling goes anywhere near the pan.
- The two-stage oven450°F to set and colour the crust, then down to 350°F to cook the filling through, for 40 to 50 minutes total. The book gives no time for the first stage, only 'until crust is brown'; on a modern oven that is likely to be nearer the shorter end, so watch the edges rather than the clock.
- Egg white on the baseBrushing the bottom crust with unbeaten egg white and letting it dry a minute before filling still works: the protein sets on contact with heat and forms a thin seal. It is a preventative against a soggy base, not a substitute for a properly thickened filling.
- Flour in the sugarThe book's flour-with-sugar trick is sound but vague. As a working guide, one to two tablespoons of flour per cup of juicy fruit, tossed with the sugar so it disperses rather than clumping. Cornstarch sets clearer and firmer and needs roughly half as much.
- Placing the lid looselyA stretched top crust shrinks as the gluten relaxes in the heat and tears away from the rim, which is exactly how juice escapes. Lift it on with slack in it and settle it down before crimping.
- Venting and the sealed edgeCut the steam vents before the crust goes on, not after, so you are not pressing a knife into the filling. The berry-pie method described here, folding the bottom crust up over the top, gives a thick sealed rim that holds up better with very wet fruit than a plain fluted edge.
Instructional pages like this one are the backbone of early twentieth-century company cookbooks, which were written for households where a young cook might have no one to learn pastry from at the elbow. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed its cook book free to policyholders as part of a broader welfare and health-education campaign, and its tone throughout is that of a patient teacher: the reasoning behind each step is given, not just the step. The particular anxieties here, a soaked bottom crust and juice boiling over onto the oven floor, tell you something about the equipment of the period, when cleaning a spill meant scraping the floor of a coal or early gas range. The pastry jagger mentioned in passing is the toothed cutting wheel long used for crimping and decorating pie edges, a tool that had already been a kitchen fixture for generations by the time this was printed.