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Chocolate Cream Pie
2 squares chocolate, 1/4 cup cornstarch, 1 teaspoon Crisco, 1 pint milk, 2 egg whites, 1/2 cup sugar, 3 egg yolks, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 1 tablespoon vanilla. Melt chocolate, add sugar, cornstarch, egg yolks, salt, Crisco and milk. Cook in double boiler till thick, stirring constantly; flavor with vanilla. Pour into a baked pie crust shell, cover with meringue made by beating egg whites till stiff and adding 2 tablespoons sugar; brown in oven and serve cold.
A straightforward cornstarch custard pie, written in the shorthand of a manufacturer's cookbook. Two things need attention: the chocolate is unsweetened, and the vanilla measurement is almost certainly a misprint.
- Squares of chocolateA square means a 1-ounce block of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 2 squares is 2 oz. With 1/2 cup sugar in the filling this makes a dark, only moderately sweet cream; if you use semisweet instead, cut the sugar to about 1/3 cup.
- That tablespoon of vanillaThree times what a pint of custard usually wants. It may well be a misprint, or simply a heavier hand with flavouring than modern taste expects; 1 teaspoon is the sensible reading.
- CriscoStill on shelves, and the reason this recipe exists — the book was published to sell it. One teaspoon of any neutral solid or liquid fat, or butter, does the same job of enriching and giving the filling gloss.
- MeasuresA pint of milk is 2 cups. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skim will set but taste thin.
- Thickening in the double boilerCornstarch needs to reach near-boiling to lose its raw taste and set fully, and a double boiler gets there slowly. Expect 12 to 20 minutes of steady stirring, and keep going for a minute or two after it thickens. Whisk the cornstarch with the sugar and a little cold milk first so it does not lump around the yolks.
- Meringue and ovenTwo whites with 2 tablespoons sugar is a thin, old-style meringue. Spread it over the filling while the filling is still hot and seal it to the crust edge; this helps keep it from shrinking or sliding. Brown at 400F for 8 to 10 minutes, or 350F for about 15.
- Odd eggsThree yolks, two whites — you will have a spare white. It keeps a few days refrigerated, or freezes.
- Yield and servingOne 8- or 9-inch pie, 6 to 8 slices. "Serve cold" is doing real work here: the filling needs three or four hours in the refrigerator to cut cleanly.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was new enough to need a book of menus to argue its case, and the single teaspoon called for here — in a pie that does not really need shortening at all — suggests how thoroughly the argument was pressed. The pie itself is older than the book: cornstarch-thickened cream pies under meringue were established American desserts well before 1900, once commercial cornstarch and boxed baking chocolate were widely available.