Cranberry-Apple Pie: Candy in a pie crust

The merry parade of cranberries continues!

Cranberry-Apple Pie 1¾ cups sugar 2 tbsp cornstarch ¼ tsp salt 4 tart medium apples ½ cup water 2½ cups whole cranberries (10 oz by weight) 3 tbsp butter 2 tbsp grated orange rind 1 unbaked deep-dish 9" pie shell (or a 10-inch if your pan isn't deep) Additional pie dough for the top, if desired Mix about half the sugar with the cornstarch and salt, set aside. Set aside the remaining sugar in a separate cup or bowl. Pare, core, and slice the apples. Place in a large saucepan with the water. Cook stirring constantly over medium or high heat until they are slightly softened, about 5 to 8 minutes. Stir in the sugar mixture, blending well. Then add the cranberries, butter, and orange rind. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium and cook until the cranberries pop, about five minutes. Taste the mixture and stir in the remaining sugar until it is as sweet as you like. (You may not use all of it.) Cool the filling completely. You can either put a lid on the pot and leave it for a few hours, or put it in a larger pot of cold water (iced water if you have an ice maker) and stir it for a few minutes. When ready to bake, heat oven to 425°. Just before adding the filling to the pie shell, brush it with cooking oil (or spritz it with cooking spray). This helps keep the crust from getting soggy. Put the filling into the pie shell. Then use the remaining dough to make a lattice top. (Or, simply lay parallel strips of crust across the pie.) Dab the end of each pastry strip with water just before pressing it onto the edge of the pie shell. Bake 20 minutes. Then reduce heat to 350° and bake until the top is a deep golden brown, about 25 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature. Source: Marion's Pie Shop (Chatham, Massachusetts), via Bon Appétit magazine, reprinted in an unknown newsletter from 1978

I was rummaging through some long-undisturbed drawers, and found this recipe clipping. The note at the bottom says it's credited to some place called "Marion's Pie Shop" in Chatham, Massachusetts. I looked them up out of curiosity, and they are still in business. However, we do know that this paper comes from 1978 (the date is on the back).

I love cranberries at this time of year because the stores can barely give them away. And even if the out-of-season peaches and strawberries weren't astronomically priced, they simply don't taste very good. But at this time of year, I can casually toss a pound or two of cranberries into the grocery cart and barely feel it when paying. Fresh, seasonal fruit is rarely so easy.

Aside from the cheap berries, I found some forgotten apples in the refrigerator. Someone else in the house had a short-lived resolve to keep fresh fruit on hand for snacking. These apples have been in the back of the fridge ever since. They're not the sort of sour apples you're supposed to bake with, but we do not waste food here at A Book of Cookrye.

I had to reread the recipe a few times before I could figure out what went into the pot in what order. Therefore it seemed wise to have all the ingredients measured and lined up beforehand. I don't usually bother with that, but sometimes you can tell that you really should. 

You'd never guess I had to cut so many bad parts off those apples!

 

The recipe says to use a 9-inch pie pan, but the ingredient amounts suggested that we would have a lot of pie on our hands. I got out the "correct" sized pan, glanced at all the ingredients that were supposed to fit in it, then put it away and got out the big one.

You can tell this recipe comes from a commercial kitchen because you completely cook the apples on the stove before putting them into the pie. Leaving a pie full of raw apples in an oven for over an hour is great at home, but it doesn't really work on a commercial scale. Though I think the ones where you load a pie with raw apples taste better. (The stovetop ones often come out like canned pie filling.)

As the apples cooked, the water became thick and gummy.

We are next directed to add a small mountain of sugar. The pot looked like when I was six years old and poured my own cornflakes.

 As we have previously learned, sugar is "hydroscopic." That means it pulls water out of whatever it sits on. This often happens so fast that it looks like water is spontaneously generating in the pot. And sure enough, the apples were swimming in their own juices after just a few seconds of stirring.

And here's why we added so much sugar: nearly a whole package of cranberries!

We were only a few ingredients away from a completed filling. I don't know what the butter is supposed to do in this recipe, but I did remember to add it.

After a few minutes over a hot burner, the pie filling had turned a beautiful cranberry red. Note also that the apples have shrunk to nearly nothing after having all their juice hygroscopically sucked out of them. This means that our fruit is swimming in extra-sweet apple juice, which made the test spoonful absolute ecstasy.

As we learned when making what some newspaper article called the perfect pie, your crusts will stay crisp if you brush them with butter or oil. Well, we at A Book of Cookrye decided to try a shortcut that whoever wrote that article in the 1930s probably never imagined: cooking spray! I highly doubt that brushing the crust with cooking oil (or "salad oil" as it was apparently called at the time) made any indispensable difference in flavor, and the spray was so much faster at making a perfect thorough coating.

No matter how many times I cook cranberries, I can never get over the absolutely beautiful color they make. This looks like it has a red velvet cake's worth of artificial dye.

I was going to make a lattice top for this, but we economized today and used beef fat in the pie crust. And even though it came out a lot better after following our ancient newspaper article's directions, it was too stiff to fold back on itself over and over again in an attempt to weave it. So I decided to take the easy way and just lay strips across the top. It was really pretty the last time we did it.

As I watched the pie bake, I was very glad I went up a pan size. It boiled a lot, and pie is always better when it stays in the pan instead of burning on the oven floor.

It bubbled a lot, but nothing dripped out.

If we look closely at our lazy lattice, we can really see the wonderful results of that pie article from my great-grandmother's binder. It tells us to stack your pastry scraps for rerolling instead of wadding and smushing them into a ball, which was new to me. But just look at all those lovely layers!

My happiness faltered on the first taste. I should have cut the sugar in this pie. No one left a half-finished slice on their plates, but no one rushed back for seconds either. I actually ended up carefully scooping out the filling and then stirring a lot of chopped raw cranberries into it. If you're going to make this pie (and I think you should!), set about half the sugar aside and then taste the filling right as you take it off the stove. Cranberries and apples are very good together, but you don't need this to be like sliceable candy.