Cream Pie
One quart cream, yolks of six eggs, ten tablespoons granulated sugar, one tablespoon butter, one tablespoon corn starch, a little salt, flavor with vanilla; stir butter and sugar together to a cream, then mix the corn starch with two tablespoons milk, then stir them in to the beaten yolks of the eggs, with butter sugar and cream; line your pie plates with rich puff paste and bake. When done, beat the whites of the eggs very stiff and add five tablespoons granulated sugar. Cover the pies with this meringue and return to the oven to brown.
A baked custard pie of the plainest sort — cream, yolks, sugar, a token spoon of cornstarch — finished with a meringue. The instructions are compressed to the point of ambiguity in one place, noted below.
- The ambiguous instruction"Line your pie plates with rich puff paste and bake" reads as though the crust goes in empty, but no second baking of the filling is mentioned before the meringue. The sense almost certainly is: line the plates, pour in the custard, and bake the two together until set. Treat the filling as a baked custard, not a stovetop one.
- YieldA quart of cream with six yolks makes enough for two, possibly three, pies, which is presumably why the original says "pie plates" and "pies" in the plural. Scale down for one.
- Oven heatEgg custard curdles above about 180F at its centre, so bake at 325-350F and pull the pies when the edge is set and the middle still trembles slightly. The meringue then goes back in at the same heat until browned, roughly 12-15 minutes, or at 400F for 5 minutes if you want a darker top and a softer interior.
- Puff pasteNineteenth-century "rich puff paste" recipes vary a good deal, but they are generally butter-heavy laminated pastes rather than a modern short crust. Bought puff pastry works, though it slumps under a wet filling; a partially blind-baked shell holds its shape better.
- The cornstarchOne tablespoon of cornstarch to a quart of cream is barely a thickener. It is insurance against weeping rather than a body-builder, and the set comes almost entirely from the six yolks. Do not increase it or the filling turns pasty.
- Creaming butter and sugarA single tablespoon of butter creamed with ten of sugar will not cream in any real sense — it will be a damp sand. Work them together as best you can, then let the warmth of the cream dissolve the sugar as you combine.
- Meringue proportionsFive tablespoons of sugar to six whites is a soft meringue by modern standards, where the usual ratio is two tablespoons per white. It will brown quickly and weep sooner. Spread it so it touches the crust all the way round, which is the standard defence against shrinking and beading.
- ServingCustard pies cut cleanly only when fully cool. Refrigerate as soon as they have cooled and eat within two days; the meringue deteriorates faster than the filling.
Cream pie sits in the same family as the custard pies that fill the dessert chapters of American household books from the 1870s onward — cheap in labour, dear in dairy, and a good showing of eggs for a Sunday table. The dividing line in these books is whether the custard is cooked on the stove and poured into a baked shell, as in what later became the standard "cream pie", or poured raw into the paste and baked with it, as here. The meringue top is often said to be the older gesture, and a browned meringue is traditionally described as a way of dressing up a plain custard without a second pastry lid.