Cranberry Apple Crumble Pie

Just out of the oven, smells amazing!

When I started this blog, my idea was to *exactly* replicate vintage recipes from my vast (if I do say so myself) collection of cook books from 1920-1990, but along the way I realized that if I actually intend to EAT the results (and enjoy them), that I might modify them... so here is a modified recipe based on a pie from 1959 edition of The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook which was a gift from my brother-from-another-mother, Grant K Gibson:

Thank you, Grant! xo

For dinner at a friend's I needed something a little special, and I wanted it to scream "Fall" so I asked 1959 what to do and she told me to see page 352 for a recipe for Cranberry Apple Pie - perfect! Except I had to go and change almost all of it. I left out tapioca, added lemon and cinnamon, and instead of the top crust, I looked above at the peach crumb pie and went with a crumb topping, but modified that as well, adding oatmeal. Whew, that's a lot of changes... but the result was delicious! 

Inspiration recipe

 Ingredients 

So because I changed the recipe so much, I will give you my steps here. Thank you 1959 for the inspiration :)

Apple Cranberry Pie: 

1 pie crust (see my 3 min no-roll, no fail recipe here) blind baked

Mixing the pie filling

FILLING: 

4 apples, peeled, cored and sliced thin (gala work especially well)

6 oz fresh or frozen (not thawed) cranberries

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 1/2 Tbsp flour

1/2 tsp cinnamon

pinch of salt

juice of 1/2 fresh lemon

2 Tbsp unsalted butter

* combine all ingredients for filling BUT BUTTER in a bowl

* dump into pie shell and top with dabs of unsalted butter (approx 2 Tbsp)

* cover with foil and bake at 425 for 30 min

Filled pie before butter and before topping

TOPPING: 

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup flour

1/2 tsp cinnamon

2 1/2 Tbsp softened butter (unsalted)

1/2 cup oatmeal (any kind but instant)

* blend with pastry cutter or fork till crumbles are the size of peas

* after first 30 min, top pie with crumble and lower heat to 375 and bake 45min to 1 hour till fruit is bubbling over and topping is browned and you smell cinnamon

* cool completely, up to 2 hours

where is my durn pastry cutter? Ah well, fork it ;)

Make a mini treat with any leftover filling in a Pyrex single serve cup or dish! 

Prepare, bake and top same as pie :)

Topping the pie

Enjoy for with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, or cold with coffee for breakfast because: PIE!

Real 1950s Cherry Pie

For Memorial Day, I felt like doing something TOTALLY American and 50s: baking a cherry pie! In addition to being politically active, that is the kind of thing that makes me feel patriotic. Well, I also happened to have a huge bag of cherries, so….

Keepin it real since 1955...

Cherry pie. It screams summer, but of course you can use canned or frozen cherries and make it any time of year – and to be SO mid-century, frozen would make sense. In the 50s, consumers were told that canned foods were clean, healthy and engineered to be more nutritious than dirty old things you grew yourself. After the war, when people had to grow food in “victory gardens” to eat, you can see why processed foods were "modern" and appealing… but I digress. I used fresh cherries this time but I DID use shortening in my pastry because that’s good and retro. Yuck! But… yum.

This is all you need! No excuses. 

So pie is basically a crust (or two) and a filling, a very simple and stunningly delicious treat that isn’t hard to master and is most certainly worth the effort. For this pie, I chose a recipe from my 1955 Duncan Hines “Dessert Book” which came from the Stagecoach Inn in Manitou Springs, CO (You guys, this place has been around since 1881! Don’t you love it when a recipe has a pedigree like that? I wonder if they still make this pie… HELLO, ROAD TRIP!!!). What I love most about this recipe, and many pie recipes you will find in old cook-books, is that there are limited directions. Implying, dear reader, that you ought already to know how to make pie, so you are presented with the ingredients for this specific one, and a brief sketch of technique. You say you can’t bake a pie? What are you, un-American?

rolling the bottom crust

my helper making the lattice top

Another reason I chose this recipe is that the filling isn’t thickened with tapioca or otherwise (not that there is anything wrong with that, but when you have fresh fruit, you can go very simple and let the fruit be the star). This filling is flavored with sugar (I cut it to just under  1 cup) and a drop of almond extract, which is a fabulous note to add to cherries. I did make a lattice top, simply because I wanted to teach my daughter how to do that (so she doesn’t need to watch a Youtube video, for god’s sake!) but we didn’t get fancy with lemon zest or an egg wash or fancy bird-shaped pie vents. But we should have used a deep dish pan to prevent over-flow... next time. Must go make another right away, this a matter of National Importance. 

Yum!