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 back out of the crust (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.

Cranberry Cabbage: or, Cranberries that aren't a dessert

We must bid a reluctant farewell to cranberry season. 

Spiced Cranberry Cabbage 1 pound (450g) red cabbage, quartered lengthwise 4 oz (110g) cranberries 2 teaspoons peanut oil 1 medium onion, chopped 1 (or 2) large garlic clove, finely chopped ¼ tsp cloves ¼ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp nutmeg Salt and pepper to taste 1 tbsp brown sugar 7½ tsp red wine vinegar Shred the cabbage finely (about ¼ inch or so). Discard the stalks and tougher portions of the leaves. Place oil in a large frying pan over medium heat. When it's hot, cook the onion for 2 to 3 minutes. Add the garlic and cook another 2 to 3 minutes. Then turn the heat up to high. Add the cabbage and cook, stirring constantly, for about 3 or 4 minutes. Then add the seasonings and cranberries. Reduce heat back to medium and cook until tender, about 5 to 10 minutes. Add the sugar and vinegar, stir well, taste to see if it has enough sugar, and serve. Note: Any leftovers are really good mixed with mashed potatoes. Delia Smith's Winter Collection, 1996

Today's recipe comes from Delia Smith's Winter Collection. Apparently she somewhat infamously started a cranberry fad after using them so heavily in the book. So I was really excited to see what creative ideas she had. This one looked a lot like a variation on the sweet-sour cabbage we have made, except with cranberries instead of apples.

I was excited to make this because every other cranberry recipe we've made has been some variant of cranberry sauce: boil cranberries and add a lot of sugar. Even the apple-cranberry pie felt like putting cranberry sauce into a pie crust instead of a serving bowl. The cranberry cream is only non-sauce recipe we have made until today.

Now that all our ingredients were lined up, it was time to try cabbage like I've never made it before. 

New recipes can sometimes be daunting. But if you are ever in doubt, start with onions!

Our refrigerator has been a bit overzealous since getting repaired. It half-froze the onions. So, I turned the heat a little higher than Delia did. Our onions were perfect and golden right on time.

I know I've said this before, but cabbage expands a lot when you shred it. This was going to be one of those recipes that leaves a ring of half-dried flyaways around the pan.

So far, this recipe had been a simple matter of sauteeing cabbage. But now, we have gotten to the special ingredient: Fresh (ish) cranberries!

After just a few seconds, the first berries popped. I was so excited. You would never know they'd been in the refrigerator for at least three weeks.

As I found out on the first taste, cranberries get very bitter when you cook them. I nearly threw out the whole thing, grocery money be damned. But just in case, I added the vinegar and brown sugar because Delia told me to. To my surprise, they fixed the dish and unlocked the flavors that I didn't know were in there. Though I should note that I had to add a few more spoonfuls of sugar to balance out the cranberries' bitterness.

I liked this a lot more without the spices (yes, I made it twice). It was also one of the few times I get almost as excited about the leftovers. We had special plans that involved a mashed potato.

 This was exactly as good as I hoped it would be.

Of course, we didn't close out cranberry season with healthy vegetables. Instead, we made cranberry blondies. (The recipe is my Mom's. By which I mean it came out of her Betty Crocker cookbook.) 

They didn't come out of the pan without a lot of well-chosen language, but they were delicious. 

 

Cranberry Salad while we still have cranberries

Cranberry season is drawing to a close! The last of the fresh cranberries have tragically migrated from the discount produce rack to the dumpster behind the store. This means that I only have the embarrassingly high number of cranberry bags I piled into my cart when I saw the clearance sign.

Cranberry Salad 1 (3 oz) box red jello (raspberry, strawberry, or suchlike) 1 cup boiling water 1 or 2 oranges, supremed (see guide here)-- or if that looks like too much work, simply juice the oranges (or use canned oranges) About 6 oz fresh cranberries 1 or 2 tart apples 1 can (undiluted) orange juice concentrate (You won't use it all) Around ¼ cup sugar Mix the gelatin and boiling water, stirring until dissolved. Wring out all the juice from the supremed oranges and stir it in. Coarsely grind the cranberries in either a hand-cranked grinder or a food processor. Then grind the apples a bit more finely than the cranberries, and stir them in. (You want to grind the apples last so they don't have any time to sit out and go brown.) If any juice dripped out of the fruit, add it to the pot (or just drink it). Add the sugar. Then add about 1 or 2 tablespoons of orange juice concentrate. Taste it, and either add more sugar, more orange concentrate, or both to taste. Place in a clear bowl and refrigerate until smooth. (It looks best in a clear bowl-- the light coming through it really shows off the color.) Note: This doesn't set very firm-- it's more like a spreadable relish than a freestanding gelatin. Source: Poppy Crocker in the comments for my great-grandmother's cranberry salad

Today, we are trying a cranberry salad from our Pieathlon friend Poppy Crocker, who writes over at Grannie Pantries. If you haven't looked at her blog, you should. She lovingly chronicles all the bygone foods that present-day food historians have desperately tried to bury. 

Anyway, I first read the recipe and thought "This looks pretty good!" Then I thought "Wait a minute, cranberry sauce without the celery?"

If you want the approximate recipe (well, halved since you always make half-recipes, and also approximate since grandma was never big on measuring): 1 box red gelatin dissolved in 1 cup hot water (we usually used raspberry). Mix half-bag of fresh cranberries and 1-2 apples-- both ground in the meat grinder, and do the cranberries first so the apples won't get brown-- with about 1/4 cup of sugar, then add to Jell-O. Add 1-2 oranges (supremed) and whatever juice you can wring out of the membranes and 1 8-oz. can of crushed pineapple. (Try tidbits if you don't want the texture of crushed.) Add a couple tablespoons of thawed orange juice concentrate. Stir it all together. Taste it and add more sugar and/or orange juice concentrate until you hit the flavor you like. Then refrigerate for a few hours and serve right out of the bowl. (It's not thick enough to unmold, plus who would want the fuss?)

We had to do some tedious knifework before we could get to the fun parts of the recipe. I'd never heard of "supreming" an orange, but I found this handy guide on Martha Stewart's website. I like that the last step is to wring all the juice out of your offcuts because 1) it reduces waste and 2) our recipe says to do that anyway. It's always reassuring when directions from different sources agree with each other.

So, to supreme an orange, you first have to cut off the peel. You can't just peel it off because you want all those membranes gone. This was surprisingly tricky because the orange gets squishier as you cut more off. Then you cut the fruit out from between the internal membranes. As bad as my attempt looks, I can conclusively say that I at least had a sharp knife. This is easy to prove: at no point did our navel oranges become blood oranges.

I thought purchasing two oranges was a bit excessive until I saw how very little orange we got out of them. Just compare the size of the discard heap to what we kept. I'm tempted to say that next time I'll just buy a can of oranges, but (as I've said before) I hate canned oranges. If you like them, feel free to get out a can opener and speed up the salad.

To be fair, the waste heap shrank a little when I squeezed the juice out of the membranes (and out of the fruit that got cut off with the peel). And we had a lot of juice from what's supposed to be scraps.So I don't think I threw out any more orange than I usually do when juicing them.

All this juice came out of the offcuts.

Next, we are supposed to use red Jello. Poppy Crocker said they usually use raspberry, but that was surprisingly elusive at the grocery store. So I got cherry instead. This may have been a mistake, because it smelled like cough syrup.

Just look at that beautiful cherry red!

As a recipe note, I only added a couple spoons of sugar because 1) there was plenty of sugar in the Jello box, and 2) I don't like my cranberry salad to be sweet enough to top a cheesecake.

With our oranges supremed and the Jello dissolved, we were ready for the fun part: shoving a lot of fruit through a meat grinder.

I was really excited about this. Check out the fruit-to-Jello ratio. This salad does not skimp on the good stuff.

I probably should have ground the apples more finely, but I didn't think of that until I was halfway done.

Our recipe says to do the apples second so they wouldn't have any time to go brown. Happily, this also means that we won't leave any cranberries behind in the grinder. The apples will push the last berries out, and I won't feel nearly so bad about rinsing apple down the sink. You can get apples any time of year, but fresh cranberries are a precious resource.

Our grinder dripped a lot of juice as we cranked it. I tipped it into the pot, but only because I (barely) resisted the temptation to just drink it.

Next, it was time for the pineapple. I was so excited about the meat grinder that I forgot that this salad is incomplete without opening at least one can. As suggested, I got pineapple tidbits because I didn't like how fibrous the crushed pineapple was last time we put it in gelatin. But crushed pineapple might have been the better choice here. At the very least, it would have blended in better with all the other pulverized fruit. I decided to pluck the pineapple back out of the pot and get out the scissors. 

And here it is, ready to refrigerate! 

Actually, hold on a minute. Is this really a halved recipe? Poppy said it was in the comments, but this is a lot of cranberry salad. Clearly I'm not the only person who really likes cranberries when they're in season. I was looking forward to a lot of peanut-butter-and-cranberry sandwiches, serving this after dinner, and being able to just take out a spoonful whenever I felt like the day needed a cranberry lift. And it'd be great on cold-cut sandwiches throughout cranberry season.

As aforementioned, this came out more like a relish than a salad. You could add an extra packet of unflavored gelatin if you really want a cranberry salad that can stand for itself, but I liked this as it was. Freestanding gelatins are often like eating rubbery water anyway.

But I don't think I should have used cherry-flavored gelatin. If the lemon jello in the earlier recipe was too weak to cut through the cranberries, the cherry was too strong for everything else in it and made this taste like cold medicine. 

Artifical cherry aside, I like how unlike a lot of other cranberry salads, this seemed like an actual salad and not a rebadged dessert. It contains so much fruit that (unlike the other cranberry salads I've made) it might actually be good for you. Either way, it's a wonderful way to serve fresh fruit.

Putting the mayo on the cranberries

We haven't committed any questionable acts of mayonnaise in a surprisingly long time.

This came out of my great-grandmother's notebook. We've made this recipe before, so let's just zoom in on that last line:

Maybe the mayo on top helps stretch this salad into the purported dozen servings. I know I'd be a bit more cautious with my portion size if I knew my cranberries were buried under mayonnaise.

Despite tossing the idea aside at first, I wondered if cranberry salad is better under mayonnaise-infused whipped cream. After all, I didn't think cranberries and celery were a good idea until I tried that. And mayonnaise and ketchup turn into thousand island dressing instead of a tragedy of condiments.

 But I didn't want to purchase an entire bottle of mayonnaise just for one silly salad. But while I was pocketing enough mayonnaise packets for a winter salad, I decided to grab an extra one to complete my great-grandmother's cranberry salad. (Sure, it's a recipe she clipped and not something she independently devised. But that's true for most American family recipes anyway).
 

It lurks in the cup, atop a single serving of whipped cream...

I had only one thought: "Well doesn't that just put the mayonnaise on my cranberry sundae?"

It's fruit with whipped cream on top, but with a special surprise...

There is no place for mayo on top of cranberries. Adding it to whipped cream makes it extra greasy (you are mixing fat into fat), and it tastes... like mayonnaise. We didn't get any magical unexpected flavor melding. I'm glad I tried this, but I am also glad I didn't sink any grocery money into it.

A lot of the recipes "of a certain age" make me think that smoking changed cooking. Like, I think the flavors in this would work if you had pre-tarred your taste buds. (The mayonnaised cream would probably feel less like straight cooking oil on the tongue.) But since we can repaint the ceilings in our house without five coats of post-nicotine primer, I was unimpressed.

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. Then 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-cornstarch 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.