Cranberry Pie
Into one cupful of pastry flour, mix quarter of a teaspoonful of salt; then chop in one tablespoonful of lard. Mix with cold water into a stiff dough. Toss out and pat until flat and long. Put one tablespoonful of butter in little dabs over the paste; sprinkle slightly with flour, fold over in three layers and pat out thin and long. Roll and pat twice; then take half of the paste and roll out to fit the plate. Roll the remainder out long and cut with a pastry jagger into narrow strips. Put a border on the edges, fill with stewed cranberries and make a latticework of the strips of crust across the top. Bake in a quick oven until the crust is brown.
A one-crust-and-lattice pie built on a quick rough-puff paste. The recipe assumes you already have a pot of stewed cranberries on the stove and gives no quantity for them, which is the main gap to fill.
- The filling is unspecifiedFor an 8- or 9-inch plate, figure about 4 cups (1 lb) fresh or frozen cranberries stewed with 1 1/2 to 2 cups sugar and a few tablespoons water until the skins burst and the mass thickens. Cranberries are high in pectin and will set firmly as they cool, so stew them until just spreadable, not stiff.
- Cool the filling firstWarm fruit melts the butter layers in the paste before the oven can turn them to steam, and a lattice laid over a hot, loose filling sinks. Spread the cranberries only when they are at room temperature.
- A quick oven425 to 450F. This paste depends on high heat to puff the folded butter; a moderate oven will leach the fat out and leave the crust heavy. Expect 25 to 35 minutes, until the lattice is well browned.
- Pastry flourLow-protein soft-wheat flour, still sold as pastry flour. All-purpose works but wants slightly less water and a lighter hand; a cup of pastry flour is around 4 oz, all-purpose closer to 4 1/2 oz.
- The fat is lean by modern habitOne tablespoon lard plus one tablespoon butter to a cup of flour is a very low fat ratio by modern standards. The technique, though -- butter dabbed on and folded in three -- is that of a rough-puff rather than a plain short crust, so do not skip the two extra rolls, and keep everything cold.
- Pastry jaggerA fluted pastry wheel. A pizza cutter or a knife gives the same strips without the scalloped edge.
- "The plate"A pie plate or tin, 8 to 9 inches. One cup of flour yields enough for a thin bottom crust plus lattice and no more, so roll it out properly thin rather than trying to stretch a thicker round.
- YieldOne pie, six modest servings. Cranberry pie is sharp and best served just warm, often with cream.
Cranberries were one of the few fruits a nineteenth-century American household could count on into midwinter: the berries keep for months in a cool cellar in water or simply in a covered crock, so cranberry pies and tarts turn up in cookbooks in the dead season between the last apples and the first rhubarb. The lattice top here is practical as much as decorative, since it lets steam escape from a very wet, sugary filling that would otherwise lift a solid lid or boil out at the edge. The folded paste, with butter dabbed on and turned in three, is the shortcut version of puff pastry that some late-Victorian writers called a "half-puff" or "flaky" paste.