Nantucket Pie (or cake or cobbler or…)

A traditional dessert from Massachusetts, Nantucket Pie combines cranberries, nuts and lots of butter to create a rich, tart, sweet, festive treat. Recipe below.

NANTUCKET PIE IS A VENN DIAGRAM KIND OF DESSERT, occupying the overlap among tart, cobbler and cake. It’s sweet, tart and festive looking.  It’s incredibly fast and simple to put together—really, it’s the perfect thing for a beginning baker—and when it comes out of the oven, it smells delightful. What it is not is pie, but that’s fine.

Nantucket Pie is a traditional recipe from Massachusetts, resurrected in 1988 by prolific author Laurie Colwin in her first cookbook, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen. Colwin wrote that this is “a cake that takes about four seconds to put together and gives an ambrosial result. Fortunately, such cakes exist and are generally found at someone else’s home. You then purloin the recipe (because you have taken care to acquire generous friends) and serve it to other friends who in turn, pass it on to yet others. This is the way in which nations are unified and relationships are made solid.”

In her lifetime, Colwin was admired for her novels and for her food writing—her cookbooks and her delightful regular contributions to Gourmet magazine. I am among her fans who love her sweet, clever, confident, joyful voice, and I strongly recommend that you get your hands on her novels—especially Happy All the Time and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object.

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Nantucket Pie

Cranberries, nuts and lots of butter make this traditional dessert from Massachusetts rich, tart, sweet and festive.

Course Dessert

Servings 8 to 12

Ingredients

• grapeseed oil (or other neutral-tasting vegetable oil)
• 2 cups fresh cranberries, halved—or coarsely chopped if halving is too tedious (you can also use frozen cranberries, thawed)
• 1/2 cup pecans, coarsely chopped (the recipe calls for walnuts, but we had pecans on hand)
• 1-1/2 cups sugar, divided
• 3/4 cup unsalted butter (1-1/2 sticks), melted
• 1 cup all-purpose unbleached flour
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/8 teaspoon almond extract (optional)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Instructions

• Prepare the baking pan by oiling it generously—I used a 9-inch springform pan, but a deep 10-inch pie pan or a 9-inch cake pan would work too. A 9-inch pie pan would be too small. Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
• Place the cranberries and pecans in a small bowl. Add 1/3 cup of sugar and toss everything together until the nuts and berries are evenly coated with sugar.
• Gently melt the butter—I usually heat it over low heat until it is almost melted, then take it off flame and stir it gently.
• Put the flour, 1 cup of sugar, the eggs and the extracts in a medium bowl. Mix together using a hand mixer, then add in the melted butter. The batter will be pretty thick.
• Pour the nut and berry mixture into the prepared pan and distribute it evenly, then scrape the batter on top. Spread it around evenly and smooth the top.
• Finally, scatter the remaining sugar on the top. As it bakes, the sugar will melt and form a lovely translucent white coating that crunches as you eat it. Alternatively, instead of regular white sugar, use coarse or sanding sugar, which will look more sparkly and textured.
• Set a timer for 35 minutes. The cake is done when it is slightly pulling away from the sides of the pan, the top is golden brown, and a tester inserted near the center comes out free of crumbs. Cool it for at least half an hour, or let it cool completely, before serving straight from the pan. This is great with a bit of vanilla ice cream or a blob of whipped cream, or simply on its own.

Kitchen Notes

Sometimes I feel like a nut. We used pecans, but traditional Nantucket Pie recipes use walnuts. Some people like almonds or macadamias or whatever tree nuts they have on hand.

Sometimes I don't. One thing I've seen with Nantucket Pie is that some people seem able to invert it out of the pan onto a lovely plate for prettier service. I just could not figure that out. When I finally did succeed in turning it onto a serving plate, it didn't look particularly lovely and I ended up putting it back into the pan, fruit side down. I recommend just not even thinking about flipping it out of the pan. This is a homey, easygoing, old-time recipe, and serving it straight from the pan just seems right.

Storage. Cover it with foil or store it in a covered container. This may be frozen for up to three months—be sure to wrap it tightly.

Liz’s Crockery Corner. We picked up this little plate in Denver early this year for almost no dollars at all, and for a long time I thought it was a late 20th century fake. The Internet, ever shabbier, was not being any help at all. It was pretty, but I seriously began thinking it was a knockoff. Then, the other night, I gave the search thing one more try, and this time got an answer. This is the Washington pattern, made by Charles Meigh & Son in Hanley, Staffordshire. It likely would have been made some time between 1851 and 1861. It's an example of "improved stone china," a high-quality ironstone product developed by Meigh in the mid 19th century. Meigh's company did not survive far into the 20th century, but today his work is regarded as instrumental to the technology of transferware, the foundation of the vast export china business developing in England in the Victorian era.