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Cream Pie (Beat thoroughly together)
Beat thoroughly together the white of one egg, half tea-cup sugar, and table-spoon of flour; then add tea-cup rich milk (some use part cream), bake with a bottom crust, and grate nutmeg on top. -Mrs. Luther Liggett.
A thin, single-crust milk custard of the kind that filled out a nineteenth-century pie plate cheaply. The whole thing hinges on baking it gently enough that the milk sets rather than curdles.
- Teacup measureA Buckeye Cookery teacup is not a standard modern cup; it is usually read as about 3/4 cup. On that reading the milk is about 3/4 cup and the sugar, being half a teacup, about 1/3 cup. Adjust if the filling looks thin for your pan.
- Pan sizeThis makes only about a cup and a quarter of filling, so it suits a small, shallow shell and will still be a thin layer; in a deep 9-inch plate it will bake into a skim.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range. Bake a custard like this at 325-350F; above that the egg protein tightens and weeps water.
- Blind-bake the bottom crustWet filling in raw pastry gives a pale, sodden base. Line and blind-bake the shell until it is dry and just colouring, then pour in the filling while the crust is still warm.
- DonenessThe edges set first. Pull the pie when the outer inch is firm and the centre still shivers, around 170-175F internally; it finishes setting as it cools. A knife-clean centre means it is already overbaked.
- Rich milkThe note that "some use part cream" matters more now than it did then, when much milk reached the cook unhomogenized with the cream still in it. Whole milk with some cream stirred in will get you toward a "rich milk"; an equal-parts milk-and-heavy-cream mix would be richer than anything likely to have been in Mrs. Liggett's pitcher.
- NutmegThe recipe does not make clear whether the nutmeg goes on before or after baking; grating it on before works well, and the oils carry into the surface of the custard. Whole nutmeg on a rasp is worth the trouble here; pre-ground tastes flat against so plain a filling.
- The leftover yolkOnly the white is used, so a yolk is left over. Save it for something else the same day.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping is generally associated with Marysville, Ohio, in the mid-1870s, though the widely circulated 1877 revised and enlarged edition carries a Minneapolis imprint. It was assembled from contributions by named local women -- Mrs. Luther Liggett among dozens of others -- which is why the pastry chapter carries several competing "cream pies" with no attempt to reconcile them. The name is misleading to modern ears: many nineteenth-century cream pies were not cream-filled in the sense of a pastry-cream or a whipped topping, but were thin milk custards thickened with a spoonful of flour and stretched with whatever egg the cook could spare, though some period versions did use a cooked cream filling. Pies of this sort belong to the same frugal tradition as vinegar pie and water pie, built from pantry staples when fruit was out of season, and this recipe finishes with a grating of nutmeg on top.