Raspberry Pie
To two cupfuls of raspberries add one cupful of ripe currants and one heaping cupful of granulated sugar, with which a tablespoonful of flour has been mixed, and stir all well together. Line the sides of a shallow pudding dish with flaky pie crust, put in the fruit, cover with a tolerably thick sheet of the paste, make several incisions for the escape of steam, and bake until the crusts are nicely browned. Serve cool. Prepare the fruit the same and bake between two crusts in pie pans.
A plain two-fruit summer pie that leans on red currants for tartness and pectin rather than on a heavy starch thickener. The instructions assume a cook who already knows her pastry, so the gaps are mostly oven heat and vessel.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A fruit pie of this kind wants a hot start to set the bottom crust — around 425F for the first 15 minutes — then 375F for another 30 to 40 minutes, until the juices bubble thickly through the vents rather than running thin.
- The currants are the pointRed currants supply both the acidity and the pectin that make this filling set with only a tablespoon of flour. If you substitute more raspberries, expect a looser pie; a second tablespoon of flour or a teaspoon of cornstarch is fair compensation.
- "Shallow pudding dish"A wide, shallow ovenproof dish, not a deep casserole. Note that the crust lines only the sides — the fruit sits on the dish itself and the top crust does the work. The second method, between two crusts in a pie pan, is the familiar version.
- Serve cool, and mean itThe instruction is structural, not stylistic. A raspberry-currant filling thickened this lightly is soup while hot and only sets as it cools to room temperature. Give it at least three hours.
- SugarOne heaping cup is roughly 8 oz. With very tart currants that is about right; with sweet cultivated raspberries you can drop to three-quarters of a cup without the filling failing to set.
- Vents"Several incisions" matters more with a wet berry filling than with apple. Cut them generously and toward the centre, or steam lifts the top crust away from the fruit and leaves a hollow dome.
- YieldThree cups of fruit is a modest filling: enough for one shallow pudding dish, or a single 8- to 9-inch pie, serving about six.
Red currants were a fixture of American and British kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century and a standard partner for sweeter berries in pies and puddings, valued precisely because they were too sour to eat out of hand but set a filling beautifully. Their near-disappearance from the American market has a specific cause: currants and gooseberries are alternate hosts for white pine blister rust, and federal and state bans on growing Ribes species, beginning in the 1910s to protect the timber industry, largely erased them from home gardens for most of a century. A cook in 1900 would have taken this combination for granted; the same recipe today usually sends the reader to a farmers' market or a freezer case.