Cranberry Meringue Pie

When you make the crust, you should put a pie in it.

Cranberry Meringue Pie 1¾ cups granulated sugar ¾ cup cold water 4 cups cranberries 2 tbsp flour 4 eggs, separated ¼ teaspoon salt 2 tbsp butter 1 teaspoon vanilla 4 tablespoons powdered sugar 1 baked deep-dish pie shell In a large saucepan, cook the sugar and water until thick and syrupy. Add cranberries. Cook, stirring constantly, until they stop popping. Then remove from heat and let cool for five to ten minutes. In a small bowl, mix the flour, salt and yolks of the eggs until smooth. With a fork (or a mini whisk if you have one), gradually beat in three tablespoons of the juice of the cooked cranberries (don't worry if a few berries get in there), beating out any lumps. If the mixture is too thick to easily stir into the rest of the pie filling, beat in more juice one spoonful at a time. Then add it to the pot of berries and simmer for three minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in the butter and vanilla. Set aside to cool. When ready to bake, heat oven to 325°. Turn the filling into the pie shell. Beat the egg whites until frothy. Then add the powdered sugar one spoonful at a time, beating until each one is dissolved before adding the next. Spread on top of the pie and bake about 15 minutes. Note: If you cut the recipe to three-quarters (that is: go from four eggs to three, and adjust the other ingredients to match), this recipe will fit very nicely in a normal, non-deep-dish pie pan. Miss Hanna Katz, Apartment 49B, Sylvania Gardens, 48th Street and Osage Avenue, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; November 8, 1935; page 14

While I was purchasing frozen fruit, I saw cranberries semi-hidden on one of the lower shelves. This is the first time I've seen them outside of a can except for those few short weeks when they take over half the fruit section.

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; November 8, 1935; page 4

As often happens with cranberry recipes, we start with a lot of sugar.

Next, we get to our featured ingredient: cranberries! After I measured them out, a small handful remained in the bag. Since I don't want to let nearly-empty packages of frozen this-and-thats pile up in the freezer, I dumped the rest of the berries into the pot. There's nothing wrong with a heaping fruit pie. 

A quick digression: The newspaper gave Miss Hanna Katz's address as an intersection, which is a very Philadelphia way of doing it. Since most of the city is a grid, people often say "Oh, the museum's on 33rd and South" instead of "It's at 3260 South Street." In case that gives her too much privacy for a newspaper-famous cook, they also printed her apartment number. I can only guess that you were supposed to send her a postcard (it's cheaper than letters) if you made the pie and liked it. By the way, the museum on 33rd and South is the Penn Archeological Museum. I used to love going there to see the glassware from ancient Rome.

Anyway, getting back to Miss Katz's pie. We're supposed to cook the cranberries until they stop popping. I didn't know if they still pop after getting frozen, but I figured we would get a pie out of them either way. Unfortunately, I couldn't hear whether the cranberries had started popping, much less when they stopped. You see, cranberries don't make a loud noise like popcorn. Instead, they pop with a soft pft... pft.... And the oven drowned out the noise.

The fan in the oven that cools the circuit boards has been making that horrible noise for a few months now, and none of use want to take the oven out of the wall and fix it. Does anyone in a house ever get around to all the problems waiting to be dealt with? If you've ever cleared the to-do list, how did it feel and how long did it last?

Since I couldn't listen for the sound of popping, I turned off the burner when the cranberries looked like they had all split open. This was close as we could get to following the directions.

We had a few little clumps of floury egg yolk that I didn't manage to whisk away, but I figured that the pie would be just fine anyway. Besides, I don't think anyone sending recipes to the newspaper in the middle of the Depression would fault me for choosing not to throw this out and start over.

At first I thought Miss Katz was bonkers for simmering this with egg in it. Wouldn't that just turn our pie filling into cranberry-flavored egg drop soup? I told myself that she got this printed in the newspaper with her name and apartment number under the title. Surely she wouldn't have risked people knocking on her door with complaints. Still, I was surprised when this actually worked. If you disregard the lumps that never went away, our pie filling was so pretty you'd think it came from a can.

When I tried a sample spoonful, it was about as sweet as cranberry juice from the bottle. The excess of sugar was not in fact an excess. I won't say you should never doubt someone who got their recipe published, but it is worth pausing to ask if you're sure you know better.

Just I thought our pie was ready to bake, I realized I had forgotten the last two ingredients:

I'm not sure what the butter does in recipes like this. It's not like a couple of spoonfuls will dramatically change the flavor or anything. But I figured the butter must be there for a reason. So I carefully scooped the pie filling out (most of it, anyway) and added what I forgot.

Having gotten our complete pie ready to bake, we only needed to put the meringue on top. When I tried a spoonful, it was a bit blander than I thought. I nearly added more sugar before thinking "Don't we have enough in the pie already?"

I expected to have a hard time covering the pie since we made a lot less meringue than what Miss Katz thought we should. But this recipe still made a lot of meringue. I imagine that if you make the full recipe, you'd have one of those extra-puffy meringues that's taller than the rest of the pie.

When we lifted out a slice, it actually lifted out.

I thought this would taste more or less like cranberry sauce in a pie pan, but somehow it had an extra richness to it. (Maybe this is why we added butter and eggs.) It wasn't excessively sweet (small mountain of sugar notwithstanding). But if the sight of so much sugar in a saucepan makes you quake, you could tip a fair amount of it back into the bag before you missed it. 

However, if you're not economizing like it's 1935, I think this would be fantastic if you skipped the meringue and served it with ice cream.