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Butter Scotch Pie
1 cup very dark brown sugar 1½ tablespoons Five Roses flour 1 tablespoon butter Yolks of 2 eggs (whites for frosting) 1 cup sweet milk, Cook in double boiler and put in baked crust.
A one-paragraph formula that assumes the cook already knows how to build a stirred custard pie. The proportions are for a small, shallow shell, and the filling is deliberately soft.
- Yield and panOne cup of milk plus two yolks makes roughly a cup and a half of filling, enough for an 8-inch shell at most, and it will not be a deep pie. Double everything for a modern 9-inch pie plate with any height to it.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk, specified because sour milk was a working ingredient in the same kitchen. Whole milk is the right substitute; skim gives a thin, chalky custard.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour from the mill that published the book. Any all-purpose flour works, and one and a half tablespoons of flour to a cup of milk is a loose set, closer to a thick sauce than a sliceable custard.
- Cook the starch throughThe hinge of the recipe. A flour-thickened yolk custard has to reach a full bubble briefly, not just thicken, or the enzyme in the yolks will thin it again as it cools and the flour will taste raw. A double boiler makes this slow, so allow 10 to 15 minutes of steady stirring and expect the mixture to sputter thickly at the end.
- TemperingRub the flour into the brown sugar, whisk in the milk, cook until thickened, then stir a little of the hot mixture into the beaten yolks before returning everything to the pot. Adding cold yolks to the hot pan directly gives you scrambled egg in the pie.
- Brown sugar"Very dark" meant a soft, moist, high-molasses sugar. Modern dark brown sugar is the closest match; light brown will read as a plain milk custard rather than butterscotch. The butter goes in off the heat, at the end.
- The frostingThe whites are most likely meant for a meringue, though the recipe says only "frosting" and gives no method: beat to soft peaks with about two tablespoons of sugar per white. Spread it over the filling while the filling is still hot and seal it to the crust edge, or it will weep. Brown it in a moderate oven, around 350F for 12 to 15 minutes -- a temperature the book does not supply.
- Baked crustThe shell is fully blind-baked before filling, since the custard is already cooked. Chill the finished pie for several hours; warm, it will run when cut.
Butterscotch as a flavour is simply brown sugar cooked with butter, and the name is generally traced to nineteenth-century English confectionery, with Doncaster in Yorkshire the town most often claimed for it; the "scotch" is commonly explained as scoring or cutting the cooled slab into pieces rather than as a reference to Scotland, though this is traditional rather than documented. By the time this pie appears, the flavour had moved out of the sweetshop and into the everyday pie repertoire, where it cost almost nothing: a cup of dark sugar, a cup of milk, two yolks and a spoonful of butter, with the whites recovered as meringue so that nothing was wasted. The Five Roses Cook Book was itself a piece of promotion, compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives and issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to keep its flour in the kitchen, which is why the flour is named by brand in a recipe that uses a tablespoon and a half of it.