Home › Pies › Strawberry Pie (Line a pie pan with paste fill)
Strawberry Pie (Line a pie pan with paste fill)
Line a pie pan with 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 till a nice brown. Take from the oven, slip to a warm plate, remove the top crust, take out the paper, fill the pie with two and one-half cupfuls of strawberries, one cupful of granulated sugar, one tablespoonful of flour. Mix the sugar with the flour, then with the berries and cook in a saucepan while the crusts are baking; replace the top crust and serve when cool.
This is a blind-baked shell and lid filled with a stovetop strawberry compote — an assembly job rather than a baked fruit pie. The one thing to get right is keeping the two crusts separate so the lid lifts off cleanly.
- "Paste" means pastryNineteenth-century books call pie dough paste. Enough for a double crust on a 9-inch pan, whether butter, lard or a mix.
- Replace the tissue paperThe paper is only there to hold the shell's shape and keep the two crusts apart while they bake. Use a round of parchment and ceramic weights or dried beans in the bottom shell instead; printed or dyed tissue has no place in an oven.
- Keep the edges freeThis is the hinge of the recipe. If the rims of the top and bottom crusts touch or seal, the lid tears when you try to lift it. Lay the top sheet loosely over the paper-filled shell and let it drape rather than crimping.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature, only "bake till a nice brown." A hot oven, around 425F for 18-22 minutes, suits pastry; go by colour, until both crusts are set and browned.
- Cook the filling until it thickensOne tablespoon of flour to two and a half cups of berries gives a loose, saucy filling, not a sliceable one. It must come to a full simmer for a minute or two or the flour will taste raw and the juice will stay thin.
- BerriesModern cultivated strawberries are generally larger and often less acidic than older varieties. A cup of sugar is generous; taste and cut it back to two-thirds if the fruit is ripe, and a squeeze of lemon sharpens it.
- Assemble lateFill only when both the crusts and the fruit have cooled, and serve within an hour or two. The pastry softens quickly once the wet filling goes in, which is exactly why the shell was baked empty in the first place.
- YieldOne pie (the recipe gives no pan size), about six servings.
Baking a crust empty and filling it afterwards was one way to keep soft summer fruit from turning pastry to pulp, and this recipe shows the technique at its most literal: the pie is built, baked, taken apart and rebuilt. Blind-baked shells were commonly weighted with whatever was to hand, rice or dried beans among them, and here paper serves the same purpose. Strawberries appear repeatedly in American pie chapters of the period because the season was short and local; before reliable refrigerated shipping, a strawberry pie was a fixture of early summer and then gone.