Raspberry Swamp Pie

- Amanda

I like cream in my pie, not on my pie. So I was like a moth to light when I read Tamasin Day-Lewis’s Sugar-Topped Raspberry Plate Tart recipe, which starts as a pure-bred fruit pie for its first baking. Then comes the fun part: you take the pie out of the oven as its burbling with warm raspberry juices, and pour a custard through a funnel beneath the crust, like you’re flooding a mine. Then you send it into the oven for one last lashing of heat. The custard doesn't behave exactly as planned. Most of it floods the mine, while the rest floods the crust plain. It all gets a little swampy, in a good way.

I started with Day-Lewis's recipe but ended up somewhere else. I didn't bother with her crust, which I'm sure would have been fine, but it called for weights and I was miles from a scale. I turned to the crostata crust in Cucina Simpatica, but couldn't resist fussing. Taking a nod from Merrill's mom's recipe for Secret Cookies, I used salted butter. In place of the regular sugar, I opted for turbinado, and I increased the flour to make the dough slightly more cooperative.

In Italy, there are cookies called brutti ma buoni -- ugly but good. This pie is their sweet cousin.

Raspberry Swamp Pie

Components adapted from The Art of the Tart by Tamasin Day-Lewis and Cucina Simpatica by Johanne Killeen and George Germon

Serves 8

For the pie crust:

• 1/4 cup turbinado sugar
  
• 2 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
  
• 2 sticks salted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes and chilled
  
• 1/4 cup ice water, plus more if needed
  
• 
  

For the filling:

• 1 pound raspberries
  
• 1/3 cup vanilla sugar (or sugar blended with either the seeds of half a vanilla bean or 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract)
  
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
  
• 1 large egg, separated
  
• 2 tablespoons turbinado sugar
  
• 3/4 cup heavy cream
• 
  

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.