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Corn-Flour Fruit Pie
Bake or stew any kind of fruit with sugar. Put it into a pie-dish, and pour over it corn-flour boiled with milk, in the proportion of four ounces of flour to one quart of milk. Brown before the fire. This makes a covering lighter and more wholesome than the ordinary pie-crust.
A Victorian economy pudding: stewed fruit under a set cornflour blancmange instead of pastry. It works, but the proportions and the finishing step both need translating.
- Corn-flour is cornstarchBritish "corn-flour" means fine white cornstarch, not cornmeal and not maize flour. Four ounces is close to a cup by volume, though weighing is safer as cornstarch packs unevenly.
- The quart is imperialAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.2 US quarts or 5 US cups. Four ounces of cornstarch to that volume gives a firm, sliceable set rather than a pourable sauce.
- Slake before heatingMix the cornstarch to a smooth cream with a little of the cold milk, then stir it into the rest as it heats. Added dry to hot milk it seizes into lumps that will not disperse.
- Cook it out properlyBring the mixture to a full boil and hold it there a minute or two, stirring constantly. Undercooked cornstarch tastes raw and chalky, and this topping is the whole point of the dish.
- Sweeten and flavour the toppingThe recipe sugars only the fruit, which leaves a bland white blanket. Two to three ounces of sugar and a vanilla pod or strip of lemon peel infused in the milk brings it into balance.
- "Brown before the fire"Browning by radiant heat from an open fire, or from a salamander. Use a broiler at high heat with the dish four to five inches from the element, two to four minutes, watching it -- a plain cornstarch surface colours suddenly and unevenly.
- Let the fruit drainStewed fruit carries a lot of syrup, and it will thin the topping from below and run when cut. Lift the fruit out with a slotted spoon and reduce the juices separately if you want them.
- YieldA quart of milk and its cornstarch will top a pie dish of about 2 quarts capacity, serving six to eight. Best eaten the day it is made; it weeps on standing.
The closing line explains the dish: the covering is "lighter and more wholesome than the ordinary pie-crust." Nineteenth-century domestic writing was often suspicious of rich short pastry, held to be hard on the digestion and costly in butter and lard alike. Cornflour was refined industrially and sold in packets from around the middle of the century, serving as thickener, invalid food and pastry substitute alike. The result here is essentially a blancmange set over stewed fruit, a cousin of the cornflour moulds that appear on Victorian and Edwardian tea tables. Browning it at the fire gives the only textural contrast the dish has.