[Sca-cooks] help with a pie

[Carole Smith]

I second what Anne-Marie said about overfilling the pie and about chilling the crust. I have found that a crust that is/was chilled browns slower, which may well be a good thing.
   
  One more thought that might be useful.  If you look at Robert May's line drawings of pie crust tops, all that are not fancy designs (which have holes) have a round hole in the middle.  There's no way I can think of to cut the design after baking without damaging the crust once it is crispy, so I cut it before placing it over the filled pie.  (Funny that's exactly what my English cousin did and she knows nothing about historic cooking.)
   
  Cordelia Toser

Anne-Marie Rousseau <dailleurs at liripipe.com> wrote:
  on pies:

yes, chilling the crust would have let it bake before it slumped a bit better. like 
how you prebake a shell and it sometimes slumps on the edges?

also, overfilling the shell so that as teh fruit cooked down, you were left with a 
space helps (my homemade fruit pies will often have this by accident. grr. blue 
ribbon pies dont do that. oh well. I tended to enter pickles in teh fair anyway.)

lastly, the amoutn of "slump" is very much dictated by the type of crust. a 
sturdier crust will be less likely to slump (many of the period recipes for pie 
crust yield a sturdy dough indeed...). a soft dough will slump more. I learned this 
the hard way...the test recipe for my parma tarts had pretty little sturdy 
crenellations. when we did it forthe banquet, in a hot kitchen with store bought 
dough, they all slumped something fierce and it was very very sad.

(another life lesson...do your test with EXACTLY the same 
brands/recipe/ingredients/conditions for a true test....)

hope this helps some! (raspberry cream tart sounds very yummy, by the way :))

--Anne-Marie
On Fri Jul 7 11:44 , Devra at aol.com sent:

>Help! A number of period recipes call for a pie to be partly cooked, and 
>then a hole made in the crust and a 'lyre' of some kind of liquid poured in 
>before the finishing cooking. I have a nice book ('Book of Old Tarts') that I got 
>on sale while in England, and have been trying a few recipes. One of them 
>(raspberry cream tart) called for just such a process.
> 
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