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Chocolate Cream Pie
Line a pie plate with rich pie crust, putting on an extra edge of crust the same as for custard pie. Fill with the chocolate filling made after the following recipe. Bake in a hot oven until crust is done; remove, and when cool, cover with a meringue and brown very slowly in moderate oven.
This is really a set of assembly instructions: the filling lives in a separate entry, and everything here is about crust and meringue. A few of the directions run against current pie practice.
- The missing halfThe chocolate filling is a cross-reference to the recipe printed immediately after this one in the book. Without that page you are working from a chocolate cream or custard filling of your own; the recipe gives no quantities and no plate size, so scale the filling to whatever pie plate you use.
- Oven numbersIn period usage "hot oven" is roughly 400-450F and "moderate" roughly 350-375F; the recipe itself gives no figures. Since the meringue is to brown "very slowly," something cooler still — 300-325F — is probably nearer the intent.
- The extra edgeA custard-pie rim is a doubled, built-up band of pastry standing above the plate. It exists to hold a liquid filling that will rise as it sets, and it is the difference between a pie and a spill.
- Wet filling, raw crustPouring a liquid custard into unbaked pastry is what produces a soggy bottom. Blind-baking the shell to a set pale gold before filling costs fifteen minutes and fixes the one real weakness in the method.
- Meringue on a cold pieThe instruction to cool completely before meringuing is the part modern practice has reversed. Meringue spread on a cold filling seals badly and weeps a layer of syrup underneath; spread it on filling that is still warm, right to the crust on all sides.
- Slow browning is rightThe low oven is not simply fussiness: too hot an oven can colour the peaks before the meringue has set through. Modern recipes divide between a longer bake around 325F and a brief one at high heat, but the slow method is a reasonable reading of the direction.
- YieldOne pie; the recipe does not state the plate size, but a standard plate gives six to eight slices. Cut with a wet knife blade or the meringue drags.
Choice Recipes was a promotional pamphlet from Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, a firm whose brand claimed a founding date of 1780, and which spent the nineteenth century as one of the best-known chocolate names in America. Booklets like this one were given away to sell cocoa and cake chocolate by the box, and they leaned on the authority of professional cooking-school figures — Maria Parloa, Fannie Farmer and Janet McKenzie Hill among them — to make the product look indispensable. A chocolate cream pie fits that purpose neatly: it is a plain custard pie, already familiar in many American kitchens, with chocolate added as the one thing the reader would have to go out and buy.