The CWI Cookbook

  Puff paste or other pie dough
1/4 lb rice
Sugar
1 lb. whole cherries, pitted
1/4 lb. powdered sugar
Egg white for crust
Apricot marmalade
Macaroons, crushed

Take a deep dish, line the edge with puff paste like a common pie; stew a quarter of a pound of rice with some sugar until quite soft and sweet; take a pound of ripe juicy cherries, which pick and roll in a quarter of a pound of powder-sugar, and lay about a quarter of them at the bottom of the dish; cover these with a fourth part of the rice, then the cherries again, and so on till your materials are used, taking care to keep the pie high in the middle; cover it with a layer of puff paste, which wash over lightly with some white of egg, and strew a little powder-sugar over; put it in a moderate oven for an hour and a quarter; then take it out, mask the crust with apricot marmalade, and a few macaroons, crushed. Serve it either hot or cold.

The Cook’s Own Book, Being a Complete Culinary Encyclopedia, by “A Boston Housekeeper” (Mrs. N. K. M. Lee), Boston, 1832

Comment: The casual note to “pick and roll” the cherries fails to mention the most arduous aspect of working with this otherwise delightful fruit, the removal of the seeds. While the pit will often come out along with the stem, exceptions must be dealt with either by knife or a little gizmo called a cherry pitter. (The gadget also works nicely to remove pits from olives, should we have any martini drinkers in our audience.)

We should note for the sake of historical accuracy that Mrs. Lee lists this alphabetically under “Pie, Anglo-Francais” so if you are looking it up in the original it is under P rather than A. What exactly gives this pie either French or Anglican character is unexplained in the text, but we admit it sounds a little classier than “Rice and Cherry Pie” probably would.