Georgia Cain
CREAM PIE
Line a deep pie tin with crust as you would for a lemon or custard pie, leaving the edge rather high all around to prevent spilling when it rises in the cooking.
Do not bake the crust first.
Add to two cups of cream, one cup of milk, three tablespoonfuls of granulated sugar, one tablespoonful of corn starch that has been mixed smooth in a little cold milk, the beaten whites of four eggs and a little grated nutmeg.
Pour into crust and bake in a moderate oven for thirty-five or forty minutes.
If the top seems to be browning too quickly, cover it over with a large pie tin and brown the top a few minutes before the pie is done.
You will find this excellent.
Georgir bañe
COUNTRY STYLE
Parboil sweetbreads, sprinkle with salt and pepper and dredge with flour. Arrange in baking dish, brush over with melted butter, allowing two tablespoons to each pair of sweetbreads, and cover with thin slices of salt fat pork. Bake in hot oven over twenty minutes, basting twice during the cooking, and remove pork during the last five minutes of the cooking.
Two separate dishes appear here under one heading: a baked cream custard pie and a pan of sweetbreads. Both are straightforward, but the pie depends on how you treat the egg whites and the crust.
- Oven temperatures"moderate" for the pie is usually taken as about 350F; the "hot oven" for the sweetbreads as roughly 400-425F.
- Whites onlyThe custard uses the beaten whites of four eggs and no yolks, which is why it sets pale and light rather than golden. The recipe does not say how far to beat them; soft peaks, folded in, is the safer course, as very stiff whites tend to rise and separate into a layer of their own.
- The unbaked shellPouring a thin liquid custard into raw pastry is what makes this pie tricky. Chill the lined tin thoroughly and set it on a preheated baking sheet in the lower third of the oven so the base sets before the filling soaks in.
- High edgeThe instruction to leave the rim tall is doing real work: the filling swells noticeably as the whites expand. A deep 9-inch tin, filled no more than three-quarters, is about right.
- DonenessThirty-five to forty minutes is reasonable, but judge by the centre. Pull the pie when the outer two inches are set and the middle still trembles slightly; it will firm as it cools. Baked until the centre is solid, the custard weeps.
- The pie tin as a shieldInverting a larger tin over the top is a period substitute for foil, and it works the same way. A loose sheet of foil is easier to lift off for the final browning.
- Cream and milkTwo cups cream to one cup milk gives a very rich set. Heavy cream works; if you want it lighter, single or light cream will still set with the cornstarch.
- Sweetbreads todayOrder veal sweetbreads from a butcher. Soak them in several changes of cold water for an hour or two, then parboil 15 minutes, cool, and peel away the membrane before flouring — the recipe assumes a cook who already knew this step.
- Salt fat porkSubstitute thin-sliced fatback, unsmoked streaky bacon, or pancetta. It is there to baste and to season; the recipe browns the sweetbreads in the final five minutes, after the pork comes off.
- YieldThe pie serves six to eight. Allow one pair of sweetbreads per two diners as a first course.
Georgia Caine was a comic-opera and Broadway performer of the early twentieth century, and this pair of contributions is typical of the celebrity cookbooks that theatrical charities produced to raise funds: a homely dessert alongside a dish with some restaurant polish. Sweetbreads were far more common on American tables in the 1900s and 1910s than they are now, though they were treated as a comparatively costly delicacy, and the "country style" here simply means roasted under salt pork rather than creamed or served in a patty shell. The cream pie, by contrast, belongs to the long family of plain baked custard pies — cream, milk, a little starch, nutmeg on top — that predate refrigeration-dependent fillings and were made wherever a household had cream to spare.