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Chocolate Pie (Two squares of grated)
Two squares of grated chocolate boiled in two cups of milk. When cool add three eggs. Sweeten to taste. Use whites of two eggs for meringue.
— Mrs. James Cartan
A community-cookbook shorthand that assumes the cook already knows how a custard pie is built. The instructions cover the filling only; crust, pan and oven are left to you.
- What a square isA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this calls for two ounces total. Grating was necessary because early cake chocolate was hard and dissolved slowly; chopping fine does the same job.
- SweeteningThe recipe says only 'sweeten to taste'. With two ounces of unsweetened chocolate and two cups of milk, something in the region of 1/2 to 2/3 cup of sugar is a reasonable starting point. Add it to the hot milk so it dissolves before the eggs go in.
- The eggs, and the ambiguityThree eggs go into the filling and two whites are reserved for meringue, which cannot both be true of the same three eggs unless the whites are pulled first. One workable reading is three yolks plus one white in the custard, two whites for the top, but the original is genuinely unclear.
- Cool means coolThis is the hinge. The chocolate milk must be lukewarm at most before the eggs are beaten in, or they set into threads and no amount of straining recovers the texture.
- No starchThere is no flour or cornstarch here, so the pie sets on egg alone and stays soft. A tablespoon of cornstarch cooked into the milk gives a firmer slice if you want one, at the cost of the silkier period texture.
- Crust and ovenThe original supplies none of this. A partially blind-baked shell of about 9 inches works; bake the filled pie at a moderate 325-350F until the centre barely trembles, roughly 30-40 minutes. Higher heat curdles a milk custard and weeps water under the meringue.
- MeringueBeat the two whites with about two tablespoons of sugar per white, spread so it touches the crust edge all round, and brown at 350F for 12-15 minutes. Sealing to the crust is what keeps it from shrinking into an island.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Chill before cutting; a warm egg custard slumps.
Community cookbooks like this one collected receipts from named local women, and the terse style reflects it: Mrs. Cartan was writing for neighbours who needed only the proportions. The measurement in "squares" points to household chocolate pressed into scored one-ounce cakes of unsweetened chocolate, sold by Baker's and its competitors, so the cook supplied all the sugar herself. Chocolate pie topped with meringue belongs to the same American family as lemon and butterscotch meringue pies, all of them built on the same custard-and-whites economy, in which the yolks thicken the filling and the leftover whites become the crown rather than being wasted.