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Frosted Currant Pie
One cupful of ripe currants, mashed fine, one cupful of sugar, one-half cupful of water, yolks of two eggs, one tablespoonful of flour. Bake with under crust. When done, beat the whites of the eggs and four spoonfuls fine white sugar. Spread on the top and brown in the oven three minutes. Delicious.
A single-crust meringue pie built on fresh red currants, from a period when nearly every kitchen garden had a currant bush. The main work is getting the crust set and the filling thickened before the meringue goes on.
- Currants means the fresh fruitThese are fresh red (or white) currants off the bush, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. Frozen currants, thawed, work as well; a cupful mashed is roughly 4-5 oz.
- Bake with under crustA bottom crust only, no lid and no lattice. Line the pan, chill it, and blind-bake it 12-15 minutes at 425F before the filling goes in, or the acidic juice will keep the pastry pale and soft.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know your range. Fill the shell and bake at 350F until the center is set and no longer sloshes, roughly 25-35 minutes for a 9-inch pie.
- One tablespoon of flour is not muchThat single spoonful is thickening the better part of two cups of sweetened juice and pulp, relying on the yolks to do the rest. Expect a soft, spoonable filling; two tablespoons of flour, or a tablespoon of cornstarch, gives a slice that holds its shape.
- Four spoonfuls of sugarAmbiguous in the original. Four tablespoons (a quarter cup) suits two egg whites by modern meringue practice; four teaspoons would give a very lean, weepy foam.
- Three minutes will not cook the meringueBrowning that fast implies a very hot oven, and it leaves the interior of the meringue barely warm. Baking it 15-20 minutes at 325F browns it more evenly and firms it through.
- Spread it to the edgeAnchor the meringue against the crust rim all the way around. Meringue that sits on the filling like an island shrinks inward and weeps underneath.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch pie, six modest slices. Meringue pies do not keep well; serve the day they are made and refrigerate leftovers.
Currant pie was once ordinary American summer baking. Red currants ripen early, need no peeling or pitting, and carry enough acid and natural pectin that even a lean filling like this one tastes like more than sugar. "Frosted" is the period word for the meringue lid, the same egg whites and sugar that turned a plain custard or lemon pie into something worth setting on the table, and it was a thrifty use for the whites left over when a recipe called only for yolks. Recipes like this thinned out over the following decades partly for reasons that had nothing to do with taste: Ribes bushes, currants and gooseberries, host part of the life cycle of white pine blister rust, and beginning in the 1910s federal and state eradication campaigns pulled them out of American gardens and orchards on a large scale. Currants have come back in farmers' markets, but for most of the twentieth century a cook opening this book would have found the main ingredient hard to buy.