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Strawberry Pie (Line a pie pan with flaky)
Line a pie pan with flaky paste; fill with white tissue paper, cover carefully with a sheet of paste, being careful not to press the edges of the upper and under crusts together, and bake until a nice brown. Take from the oven, slip on a plate (from which it will be served); remove the top crust, take out the paper, fill the pie with three cupfuls of strawberries, one cupful of granulated sugar. Mix the sugar with the berries, replace the top crust and serve.
This is a blind-baked double crust used as a container: the shell and lid are baked empty, then filled with raw sugared berries at the last moment. A few of the mechanics need translating.
- The hinge: do not seal the edgesThe whole method depends on the top crust lifting off cleanly after baking. No egg wash at the rim, no crimping, no fork-pressing — just lay the sheet of pastry over and let it rest on the lower crust's edge.
- Tissue paperThe paper is there to keep the lid from slumping into the empty shell. Modern tissue is often dyed, printed or sized; use crumpled parchment instead, or a loose ball of foil, which does the same job without touching food you will eat.
- Weight the bottom crust tooThe original relies on the paper alone. A layer of parchment and dried beans or pie weights in the lower shell keeps it from bubbling up and jamming against the lid.
- "Flaky paste"Usage varies between books of this period: some mean a plain short crust, others a rough-puff or layered pastry. Either way it is made with lard, or half lard and half butter, worked cold and barely handled. Around 2 1/2 cups flour to 1 cup fat will make both crusts.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; "bake until a nice brown" suggests a fairly hot oven. As a modern working guide, 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then 375F until both crusts are evenly browned and dry underneath, roughly 25 to 30 minutes total.
- Macerate briefly, not longMix the hulled berries with the sugar 10 to 15 minutes before serving so the sugar dissolves into a light syrup. Left an hour, the fruit collapses and floods the shell.
- Assemble at the table's edgeBecause nothing is cooked after filling, the crust goes soft within minutes. Slip the shell onto its serving plate, fill, cap and carry it straight out.
- YieldThe recipe gives no pan size; three cupfuls of berries suits about a 9-inch pie, six modest wedges. Three cupfuls is roughly 1 lb of berries; a cup of sugar is generous by modern taste and can be cut by a third with good fruit.
Recipes of this kind treat the pastry as a vessel: the shell is baked and the fruit is never cooked at all. Late nineteenth-century American cookbooks contain various expedients for soft summer fruit, which turns dull under a baked lid, though how common this particular trick of baking a lidded shell over a wad of paper was is not clear. Paper, and later dried beans or manufactured weights, served to keep blind-baked crusts from blistering. The Twentieth Century Cook Book belongs to an era of short local seasons, when fresh strawberries were a matter of a few weeks in early summer, and a hostess had reason to show them raw and whole rather than cook them into jam.