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Custard Pie (Heat one quart good rich milk)
Heat one quart good rich milk in a tin-pan set in a skillet of hot water; take five eggs, four large table-spoons sugar, and a little salt, beat sugar and eggs a little, and pour in the milk; flavor to suit the taste and have oven hot when put in to bake. Then cook slowly so as not to boil, as that spoils it; test with a knife, when done it will not stick to blade. Without the crust, this makes a delicious baked custard. Bake in a deep tin -Mrs. C. B. Boody, Kirkhoven, Minn.
A plain baked custard pie of the old proportions: a quart of milk to five eggs, sweetened lightly and set in a single deep crust. The whole recipe hinges on the last line of the method — the custard must never reach a boil.
- The hinge: heat, not boilEgg proteins set around 175-180F; above about 185F they contract and squeeze out water, which is the curdled, weeping custard the recipe warns against. The recipe names no temperatures: "have oven hot when put in" followed by "cook slowly" suggests a hot start — roughly 425F for the first 10-15 minutes to set the pastry — then dropping to about 325F for the remainder.
- Reading "have oven hot when put in"A wood-range cook loaded a hot oven and let it fall as the fire died. A modern oven holds its setting, so you have to make that drop yourself by turning the dial down.
- The tin-pan in a skillet of hot waterThis is a improvised double boiler for scalding the milk gently. Any heavy saucepan over low heat does the same; bring the milk just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edge, not to a rolling boil.
- Tempering"Pour in the milk" means pour the hot milk into the beaten eggs in a slow stream while whisking. Reversing the order, or dumping it in at once, scrambles the eggs before they ever see the oven.
- Quantities and panFour large tablespoons of sugar is roughly 1/4 cup — very lightly sweetened by current taste, and worth increasing to 1/3 or 1/2 cup if you want a dessert rather than a breakfast pie. A quart of custard needs a genuinely deep 9- or 10-inch plate; a standard shallow shell will overflow.
- The crust problemRaw pastry under a liquid filling goes sodden. Blind-bake the shell until dry and just colouring, then pour in the warm custard while the crust is still hot.
- The knife testTest an inch or two in from the edge, not dead centre. When the blade comes out clean there but the middle still wobbles like set jelly, pull it — carryover heat finishes the centre. A clean knife in the middle means it is already slightly overdone.
- Flavouring"Flavor to suit the taste" in a book of this date commonly meant grated nutmeg over the top, or a spoonful of vanilla or rose water, or lemon peel steeped in the scalding milk.
- Yield and servingOne deep pie, eight slices. Cool completely before cutting; a warm custard pie slumps. Refrigerate leftovers, as with any egg-and-milk dish.
Custard pie belongs to the oldest layer of English pastry cookery — the medieval "crustade" was a pastry coffin filled with a set egg-and-cream mixture — and it arrived in American kitchens as a household standby rather than a special occasion sweet. Its appeal to a farm household of the 1870s is plain in the ingredient list: milk and eggs produced at home, with a little sugar and the flour for the crust bought in. Buckeye Cookery was assembled from contributions by women across the Midwest, and this one comes from Kirkhoven, Minnesota; the note that the filling "without the crust, this makes a delicious baked custard" reflects how thin the line was between pie and pudding when the same bowl of custard could serve either purpose. The warning against boiling is one of several pieces of technique the contributor thought worth spelling out, which tells you how often it went wrong on an unregulated wood range.