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Corn Starch Pies
One quart milk, yolks of two eggs, two table-spoons corn starch, two cups sugar; mix starch in a little milk, boil the rest of the milk to a thick cream, beat the yolks and add starch, put in the boiled milk and add sugar; bake with an under crust, beat whites with two table-spoons sugar, and put on top of pies, and, when done, return to oven and brown. -Mrs. J. W. Grubbs, Richmond, Indiana.
A thrifty custard pie that leans on cornstarch instead of eggs. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a boiled custard behaves, so the two places it can fail are thickening and the crust.
- YieldA quart of milk with a filling this thin fills two 9-inch pies, which is why the original says "pies" in the plural. Halve everything for a single pie.
- Thickening is under-specifiedTwo tablespoons of cornstarch is very little for a full quart of milk. The instruction to "boil the rest of the milk to a thick cream" is ambiguous: it may mean reduce the milk before the starch goes in, or simply cook it until thick. If you do not reduce it, a filling that slices will want considerably more starch -- roughly 6 tablespoons or more per quart, bearing in mind the two yolks also thicken.
- Temper the yolks"Beat the yolks and add starch, put in the boiled milk" means pour the hot milk into the yolk-starch mixture gradually, whisking, then return it to the pan and cook until it thickens and the raw-starch taste is gone. Adding yolks straight to boiling milk scrambles them.
- Blind bake the shellAn "under crust" filled with an already-cooked custard needs to be baked empty first: 400F for about 15 minutes with weights, until dry and pale gold. A raw shell under a wet filling goes to paste.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven guidance. For a modern oven, 350F for 25 to 30 minutes will finish the filled pie. To brown the meringue, 350F for 12 to 15 minutes tends to give a firmer, less weepy result than a short blast at high heat.
- SugarTwo cups for a quart of milk is very sweet by current taste; one cup, or one and a quarter, reads as a custard rather than a confection. The two tablespoons in the meringue are for two egg whites and should not be cut.
- MeringueSpread it so it touches the crust edge all the way round, which anchors it and keeps it from shrinking into an island in the middle.
Cornstarch was a relatively new household staple when Buckeye Cookery was compiled in 1877 -- commercial corn starch manufacture had grown through the 1840s and 50s, and by the 1870s boxed starch was cheap and shelf-stable in a way that eggs, seasonal and perishable, were not. A recipe like this one stretches two yolks across two pies, doing with starch some of what an older custard pie did with a larger number of eggs. The attribution to Mrs. J. W. Grubbs of Richmond, Indiana, is typical of the book, which gathered contributions from named women in Ohio and neighbouring states, terse shorthand and all. The result is a pie that sits somewhere between a true baked custard and the cornstarch-thickened cream pies familiar from later American baking.