Why is it whenever I see a clean kitchen, I feel compelled to step in and mess it up? That's what happened last night when, not a minute after DH finished doing the dishes, I began pulling out all my pie baking supplies -- rolling pin, flour bin, butter and more.
My mission wasn't to fling around some flour (though that happened too), but to prepare a fresh raspberry pie asap. That's because we had harvested quite a crop of red and yellow raspberries at a U-Pick farm the day before and, as gorgeous as they are, the instant they're off the vine they begin to degrade. I knew I had to act fast.
Finding a vintage raspberry pie recipe isn't that easy. Because it takes so many raspberries to make a pie, recipes usually feature another fruit like peaches. Also, fruit pie making in the old days (when women baked daily and ready-made pies weren't as available) didn't require a recipe -- prepare a crust, mix whatever fruit you had with some sugar and thickener (tapioca, flour or cornstarch), fill and bake. What could be simpler?
But the c. 1955 Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, my mother's go-to cookbook, came to the rescue. I didn't weigh the berries, but used about 4.5 cups.
I'm pretty confident it will be good, because once before I prepared four raspberry pies, froze them, and then baked them whenever I needed dessert. That was years ago, when my son was only six and had just received a Playstation -- a Godsend that kept him busy for HOURS (unheard of for him!) allowing me to prepare not only the pies but two loaves of bread! (Lest all you parents out there scold me for outsourcing parental influence to a game and nurturing an addiction to same, at age 21, my son no longer plays video games.)
Anyway, last night I made just one pie, and after carefully wrapping it, I placed it next to our freezer's most prized possessions and legacy from my children's growing-up: two snowballs from the Blizzard of 1996.
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