Cherry Pie
Pick over and wash two or three cupfuls of sour cherries, add to them one cupful of granulated sugar and a tablespoonful of flour mixed together. Line the sides of an earthen or graniteware pudding dish with paste, fill with the prepared cherries and cover with a sheet of paste, rolled twice as thick as ordinary pie crust. Make several incisions near the center for the escape of steam and bake until the crust is a nice brown.
A deep-dish cherry pie with a bottom-less construction: paste lines only the sides of the dish, and a thick top crust carries the whole thing. The original gives no oven temperature or time, so both need supplying.
- Oven and timeBake at 425F for the first 20 minutes to set and brown the thick lid, then drop to 375F for another 25 to 30 minutes, until the juice bubbles up through the slashes. Total is around 50 minutes; "a nice brown" alone will mislead you if the filling is still cold in the middle.
- Sides only, no bottomThis is deliberate, not an omission. Paste on the sides and a lid keeps the crust out of the pooling cherry juice; a bottom crust in a deep dish of sour cherries goes to paste. Do not add one.
- "Rolled twice as thick"About a quarter inch rather than the usual eighth. The thick lid has to span the dish unsupported and hold up when the fruit collapses beneath it.
- Pudding dishAn earthen or graniteware pudding dish of the period is roughly a 1.5 to 2 quart deep baking dish. A modern 9-inch deep pie plate or a 2-quart oval baker both work; enameled steel and stoneware behave much as the originals did.
- Sour cherriesMorellos or Montmorency, not sweet Bings. Two to three cups is 12 to 16 oz pitted. Frozen sour cherries work; thaw and drain some of the liquid, or the tablespoon of flour will not hold it.
- ThickeningOne tablespoon of flour for three cups of fruit gives a loose, juicy filling that will run when cut, which is what a pudding-dish pie is for. If you want it sliceable, use two tablespoons of cornstarch instead and expect a firmer set.
- SugarA cup is right for genuinely sour cherries. Taste the fruit first; anything approaching a sweet cherry needs closer to two-thirds of a cup, or the pie turns cloying.
- YieldFour to six servings, depending on the dish; the recipe's two to three cupfuls only part-fill a 2-quart baker. Serve warm, in bowls, with cream.
American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s can often be read as drawing a working distinction between the shallow two-crust pie baked in a tin plate and the deep-dish fruit pie baked in an earthen or graniteware pudding dish, which is closer to an English fruit pie or a cobbler. The extra-thick lid here belongs to that deeper tradition: it functions as a self-supporting cover over a large volume of fruit rather than as a crisp pastry shell. Graniteware itself brackets the recipe only loosely, since enameled sheet-steel kitchenware was made in America from the 1870s and stayed common well into the twentieth century; it spread quickly through American households as a cheap, non-reactive alternative to tin and cast iron, and was well suited to acidic fruit. Sour cherries were the domestic pie cherry throughout this period, grown in home orchards and briefly abundant in early summer, which is why so many books of the time treat the sour cherry, not the sweet, as the default.