Mock Cherry Pie: or, A Book of Cookrye makes a mockery of cherries

If you are looking for an adventurous way to delight and slightly bamboozle your relatives this Thanksgiving, this pie is perfect.

Mock Cherry Pie 1½ cups (5.5 oz) raw cranberries ½ cup (about 3 oz) raisins 1 cup water 1 cup sugar 1½ tbsp (or 4½ tsp) cornstarch 1 cup sugar 1 unbaked pie shell (plus enough dough for a top crust or lattice if desired) Heat oven to 350°. Cut the cranberries in half.* This is easier with scissors than a knife. Place raisins, cranberries, and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. While they are heating up, mix the cornstarch and sugar, breaking up all the cornstarch lumps. Stir the sugar into the boiling pot, and bring back to a boil. Cook, stirring constantly, until thickened and transparent. Then cool completely. (You can cool it faster by putting the pot in a larger pan of cold water— or ice water if you have an ice maker— and stirring it until it cools off.) While the filling cools off, make the pie crust if you're preparing one from scratch.  Pour the cooled filling into the pie shell. Make sure you leave room for it to bubble and boil up a bit in the oven. Finger-dab or brush water around the edge of the pie crust. Cover with a top crust, or a lattice. Or, if desired, leave the top open. Bake until the crust is golden on top, about 30-40 minutes. *If you don't want to cut all those cranberries in half, you can instead put them whole into the pot along with the water and raisins. Bring to a boil, cover with a lid, reduce heat to a simmer, and cook until you hear the cranberries stop popping. Then proceed with the rest of the recipe. The pie won't taste as convincingly of cherries, but it's still really good. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

I never thought anyone would need to imitate cherries. Even when fresh cherries are out of season, stores always have canned cherry pie. Maybe cherries were impossibly expensive in the 1930s. Or perhaps Mrs. Mary Martensen created this recipe so for the busy home cook who didn't have time to waste with a cherry pitter. Even cutting cranberries in half one at a time is faster than pitting cherries. Or, maybe cranberries used to be so cheap that people needed to disguise them, like someone serving turkey sixteen nights in a row because it was on discount.

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

The halved cranberries kind of look like miniature apples, don't they?

 

Our filling was done only a few minutes after turning on the stove. But as we learned with the honey fruit pie, things go very wrong when you pour steaming-hot filling into a raw pie crust. We're here to make a mockery of cherries, not find fifty new reasons for kitchen profanity. I therefore let the pie filling cool off, after which it slid right into the pie pan without ruining anything.

I was going to make a lattice top out of our excess pie dough, but I had a sudden attack of laziness. So, I just laid some strips across the top and declared it done.

While the pie baked, I decided to try the syrup that remained in the pot. (I may or may not have done a deliberately bad job with a rubber spatula.) And it tasted astonishingly like cherries. You had to carefully examine the flavors before you could tell that something was amiss.

Before the pie had finished baking, I had already filed this recipe away for next fall. When fresh cherries are in season and everyone the house starts buying them by the sack, I start craving cherry pie. But the cherries get eaten too quickly for me to bake them, and I cannot justify swatting everyone else away from fresh fruit.But I know that I won't need to defend cranberries and raisins against anybody.

I don't know if I'll ever be comfortable with an oven this large. Yes, I could put a whole turkey in there if I wanted. But even a full-sized pie looks puny in such a massive space, which makes me feel bad about the wasted heat.

After the pie was baked, it even looked like it was loaded with cherries. The cranberries and raisins had dyed each other as the filling bubbled in the oven, and their respective colors had averaged out to a reasonable approximation of cherry red. You can really see the near-perfect cherry color if we zoom in on the edge of the pie, where the filling bubbled up a little bit as it baked.

But really, I was just amazed at how pretty this pie is.

I would have never thought that cranberries and raisins add up to cherries. But when I brought this pie with me on a visit, none of my friends believed me when I said it is cherry-free. Everyone thought I was testing their gullibility.

The pie doesn't taste exactly like cherries, but it gets unnervingly close. If no one told you otherwise, you would think it was mostly cherries with a few other things stirred in. And even if you were told the truth, you might not believe it. (Again, my friends thought I was lying.)

Because I had enough cranberries to make this again, I tried it without snipping the cranberries in half. I wanted to know whether all that fruit bifurcation was really necessary, or if it was yet another instance of older recipes adding pointless extra steps (which happens surprisingly often). 

Borrowing methods from the cranberry-celery salad, I boiled the cranberries until they popped. Then I added the raisins and everything else. And... the pie still tasted cherry-ish, but it wasn't as convincing. Maybe cutting the cranberries allows all of the flavors to meld, rather than keeping the berries' interiors half-shielded by their own skins. It was still a really good pie, but it wasn't as good of a cherry pie.

I made this recipe because I thought a cranberry-raisin pie would be good on its own. I wasn't prepared for it to actually taste like cherries. If this cookbook tells me that I can mix corn and avocados and it will taste like bacon, I'm not going to argue without trying it first.