Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Cream Pie
Cream Pie
3 eggs, 3 tablespoons sugar, 3 tablespoons flour, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 1/2 pints milk, and 1 teaspoon lemon extract.
Mix sugar and flour and then put into a saucepan, then add yolks of eggs, Crisco, milk and flavoring. Stir constantly until it thickens and then divide into 2 baked pie crusts and cover with a meringue made of whites of eggs. Macaroni, a I'Italienne 1/4 pound macaroni, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons Crisco, salt and paprika to taste, 1/2 cup brown stock, 1/2 cup tomato pulp, and 1/2 cup grated cheese. Make sauce of Crisco, flour seasonings, stock, and tomato pulp. Tomato pulp should be quite thick from long cooking. Add macaroni, cooked until tender, in boiling salted water, rinsed and drained. Reheat in double boiler, adding cheese meanwhile. Serve when cheese is melted and whole is very hot.
Two separate recipes have run together here: a cream pie filling with meringue, and a macaroni dish. Read them as two, and note that the pie's proportions are looser than a modern pastry cream.
- Two recipes, one blockThe cream pie ends at "cover with a meringue made of whites of eggs." Everything from "Macaroni, a l'Italienne" onward is the next entry in the book, printed without a break.
- CriscoThis book was written to promote Crisco, then a new all-vegetable shortening. In the pie filling the tablespoon of fat is doing the work of butter; use butter for better flavour. In the macaroni sauce it is simply the roux fat, so butter or oil is fine.
- Measurements1 1/2 pints milk is 3 cups. The recipe uses tablespoons throughout, so no other conversion is needed.
- The filling will set softThree tablespoons of flour and three yolks to three cups of milk is thin by modern standards, and split between two shells it barely fills them. Either make a single 9-inch pie, or keep the two shells and raise the flour to about 6 tablespoons. Whichever you choose, let the mixture actually boil for a minute or two after it thickens, or the raw flour taste and the starch's full thickening never come through.
- Stirring"Stir constantly" is the hinge. Use a heavy saucepan over medium heat and a flat whisk or wooden spoon that reaches the corners; yolk-and-flour custards catch and scorch at the base long before the surface looks hot.
- The meringueNo method or oven is given. Beat the three whites to soft peaks with about 6 tablespoons sugar, spread it so it touches the crust all round, and bake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes until the peaks colour. Spooning unbaked whites onto the pie, as the bare text suggests, leaves raw egg on the plate.
- Tomato pulp"Quite thick from long cooking" means reduced fresh tomato, not sauce from a jar. Canned crushed tomatoes cooked down to half a cup of near-paste consistency will do.
- Macaroni handlingThis recipe calls for rinsing the cooked macaroni, and it is worth keeping here, since the pasta is reheated in a double boiler and rinsing stops it gluing together. The half cup of brown stock is a beef or veal stock; any dark stock works.
- YieldThe filling as written fills two 8- or 9-inch shells thinly, or one generously. The macaroni serves two or three as a side.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the cookbook published by a food manufacturer, with its product written into every recipe. Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a clean, modern, keeping alternative to lard and butter, and the company commissioned recipe collections to teach cooks that it could stand in for both. That is why a tablespoon of shortening appears in a custard filling, where a nineteenth-century cook would have written butter without thinking. The cream pie itself is much older than the shortening: a flour-thickened boiled custard in a blind-baked shell, crowned with the leftover whites as meringue, is the thrifty logic of the American pie tradition, using every part of the egg in one dish. The macaroni "a l'Italienne" reflects the period's confidence that a tomato-and-cheese sauce was sufficient to make a dish Italian.