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Whipped Cream Pie
Sweeten with white sugar one tea-cup very thick sweet cream, made as cold as possible without freezing, and flavor with lemon or vanilla to taste; beat until as light as eggs for frosting, and keep cool until the crust is ready; make crust moderately rich, prick well with a fork to prevent blistering, bake, spread on the cream, and to add finish put bits of jelly over the top. The above will make two pies. Mrs. A. M. Alexander, Harrisburg.
A blind-baked shell filled with sweetened whipped cream — nothing more, which means the cream and the crust each have to be right. Assemble it within an hour of serving.
- A tea-cup of creamA tea-cup in Buckeye Cookery is smaller than a modern measuring cup — commonly reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup, though period usage varies. Since the cream is whipped and divided between two pies, err on the generous side: a full cup of heavy cream whips to roughly two cups, which is a thin but authentic layer across two shells.
- "Sweet cream" means fresh, not sugaredIn nineteenth-century usage sweet cream is simply cream that has not soured — the opposite of the sour cream and clabber that dominated farm dairies. "Very thick" means the top-of-the-jar cream from unhomogenised milk, higher in fat than most cartons today. Use heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat, and avoid ultra-pasteurised, which whips slowly and holds less air.
- Cold is the whole trick"As cold as possible without freezing" is not decoration. Chill the cream, the bowl and the beater; cream near 35F whips to twice its volume, cream at room temperature may not stiffen at all.
- As light as eggs for frostingThat is stiff peaks — the stage at which beaten egg white holds its shape for icing. Stop there. Carried past that point the cream turns grainy and will eventually separate into butter and buttermilk.
- Baking the shellPrick the base thoroughly as directed; that is the only precaution the recipe gives, and it names no oven temperature. Lining with parchment and weights for the first two-thirds of the bake is a modern addition that keeps the sides from slumping. A hot oven — around 400 to 425F — for about 15 minutes with weights and 8 to 10 minutes without, until the crust is dry and pale gold.
- Cool the crust completelyThe instruction to keep the cream cool until the crust is ready cuts both ways: a shell even slightly warm will melt the cream into the pastry within minutes.
- Holding timeUnstabilised whipped cream begins to weep after an hour or two, and the crust softens under it. This is a pie to fill at the table's edge, not one to refrigerate overnight.
- The jelly finishBits of jelly means small spoonfuls of a firm, bright preserve — currant jelly was common in period kitchens — dropped over the surface. Use a stiff jelly rather than a runny jam, which will bleed pink streaks through the cream.
- YieldTwo pies; the recipe gives no size, but 8- or 9-inch shells are the likely intention. Halve the whole recipe for a single pie.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Marysville, Ohio, 1877) was assembled from contributions by named women across Ohio and neighbouring states, and Mrs. A. M. Alexander of Harrisburg is one of hundreds credited beside their recipes — a format that made the book both a cookbook and a record of who in a community was known for what. A pie like this one belonged to households with their own cow or a reliable dairy: skimming enough thick cream for two pies was a real expense, and no amount of skill substituted for the raw material. It also depended on ice or a cold cellar, which is why the recipe returns twice to keeping things cold — a summer whipped cream pie was a small demonstration that the household had an icehouse or an ice delivery. The technique of blind-baking a shell and filling it with an uncooked cream is much older than the book and runs straight through to the icebox and chiffon pies of the twentieth century, which added gelatin to solve the weeping problem this version simply lives with.