Carolina Pie
One quart milk, yolks of eight eggs, one cup sugar, one teaspoon corn starch, flavor with lemon or vanilla, a little salt. These pies do not require an upper crust and are convenient to make after making angel food cake, as it saves the yolks of the eggs, besides being a delicious pie.
This is a plain baked custard pie, written for a cook who already knew how to line a pie plate and how her stove behaved. The quantities are sound; almost everything else has to be supplied.
- YieldA quart of milk with eight yolks makes enough custard for two 9-inch single-crust pies, or one deep 10-inch. The recipe assumes you know this and have the shells ready.
- No oven givenA custard pie wants a moderate oven, around 350F. Beyond that the temperature matters less than the endpoint.
- When it is doneThe custard should still wobble in a circle about the size of a silver dollar at the centre when you take it out; it carries on setting as it cools. Baked until the middle is firm, it will weep and crack. An instant-read thermometer at the centre should show about 170-175F.
- The crust problemA wet custard poured into raw pastry gives a soggy base. Blind-bake the shell until dry and just coloured, then pour the warm custard in while the shell is still hot.
- Corn starchOne teaspoon in a quart is too little to thicken; at most it gives a small margin against curdling. Whisk it into the sugar before adding liquid so it does not lump.
- Scald the milkMany period custard recipes heat the milk to just below boiling before it meets the eggs, and temper it in slowly; this one is silent on the point. Cold milk works but lengthens the bake.
- FlavouringIf you use lemon, take the zest and steep it in the hot milk, then strain; lemon juice will curdle the custard. Vanilla goes in after the milk has cooled slightly.
- Angel food connectionThe note is practical arithmetic: an angel food cake of the period took ten to twelve whites, leaving yolks that would not keep. Yolks refrigerate for two days under a film of cold water, or freeze beaten with a pinch of salt.
- StorageEgg-and-milk custard is not a counter pie. Cool it, then refrigerate, and eat within three days.
Custard pie in one form or another runs through nineteenth-century American cookery under a number of local names - Quaker pie, buttermilk pie, chess pie - and the regional label here may say less about Carolina than about the habit of attaching a place name to a plain dish to give it standing on a printed page. What dates this particular version is the aside about angel food cake. That cake spread rapidly through American household books in the last quarter of the 1800s, and it left every cook who made it with a bowl of yolks and a problem. Yolk-heavy custards, gold cakes and boiled dressings appear all through the dessert sections of these books for exactly that reason.