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Cream Pie
2 eggs, 2 cupfuls milk, 1 cupful sugar, 1 table-spoonful corn starch. Flavor with lemon or vanilla. Beat the yolks, sugar, and corn starch together, and make like boiled custard; then put in a baked crust, and set in hot oven until it thickens. Beat the whites with a little sugar, flavor, and put on top; brown in hot oven. This makes one pie. 1/2 cupful of cocoanut, shredded, may be added to the filling.
A standard boiled-custard pie with a meringue top, of the kind that appears in nearly every American household book of the period. The filling is thickened on the stove first, so the oven work is brief.
- The hinge: cook the custard properly on the stove"Make like boiled custard" means cooking the yolks, sugar, cornstarch and milk over gentle heat, stirring constantly, until it visibly thickens and coats the spoon. A cornstarch custard needs to reach a bare simmer for a minute or so to lose its raw starch taste, but it will curdle if allowed to boil hard.
- CupfulsA period cupful is usually treated as close to today's 8 fl oz cup, though the book gives no measure. One tablespoon of cornstarch to two cups of milk, with two eggs, gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a sliceable one; a second tablespoon is nearer modern expectations if you want clean wedges.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; period usage of "hot" is generally read as somewhere around 400-450F. The filled shell needs only long enough to set the surface, and the meringue browns quickly at that heat -- watch it rather than time it. A moderate oven (about 350F) for longer gives a more stable meringue.
- Blind-baked shellThe recipe calls for a "baked crust," so the shell should be fully baked before the custard goes in; baking it with weights until dry and golden helps keep the base from going soft.
- Meringue"A little sugar" is vague; use about 2 tablespoons per egg white, beaten in gradually after the whites hold soft peaks. Spread it so it touches the crust rim all round, which keeps it from shrinking away as it bakes.
- CocoanutShredded coconut sold in this period was often unsweetened and dry. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the filling noticeably sweeter; reduce the sugar slightly or use unsweetened.
- Yield and keepingOne pie, probably eight or nine inches. Custard pies with meringue are at their best the day they are made and should be refrigerated; the meringue weeps after a day.
Cream pie in nineteenth-century American usage often contained no cream at all: a milk-and-egg custard thickened with a spoonful of starch, poured into a baked shell and crowned with the whites. Cornstarch was produced commercially in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century, and a starch-thickened filling of this kind needed fewer eggs than a custard set by eggs alone. Closely related fillings, with coconut or chocolate or sliced banana, belong to the same family as the later American cream pies.