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Buttermilk Pie (Makes 2 Pies)
2 cups buttermilk 2 tablespoons Five Roses flour 2 tablespoons butter 2 eggs 1 cup sugar.
Bake with an undercrust.
A bare-bones custard formula of the kind Canadian flour companies printed by the hundred: the assumption is that the cook already knows how to line a plate and judge a set custard. The quantities are thin for two pies by modern standards, so read the yield note first.
- Yield, honestlyThe two cups of buttermilk plus sugar, eggs and butter come to roughly three cups of filling, so split between two shells each pie is shallow, around a cup and a half. Baked in a single 8- or 9-inch pie it makes one properly filled pie, and that is the more useful reading today.
- Five Roses flourThe house brand of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, a hard-wheat white flour. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the direct substitute; the two tablespoons give the custard a little body and help keep it from weeping.
- "Bake with an undercrust"This means a single bottom crust, no lid and no lattice. Because the filling is wet and only lightly thickened, blind-bake the shell until dry and pale gold before filling, or the base will stay slack.
- Oven, which the recipe omitsStart at 425F for the first 10 minutes to set the pastry edge, then drop to 325F for a further 30 to 40 minutes. Custard baked hot throughout will curdle and separate.
- The hinge: judging the setPull the pie when the outer two inches are firm and a circle in the middle the size of a coin still shakes as a unit, about 175F at the center. It finishes setting as it cools; a fully firm pie in the oven is an overbaked pie on the table.
- ButtermilkPeriod buttermilk was the thin, sharp liquid left from churning butter. Modern cultured buttermilk is thicker and at least as sharp, and behaves the same here. Do not substitute milk soured with vinegar; the body is wrong for a custard this lean.
- Method, reconstructedCream the softened butter with the sugar and flour, beat in the eggs one at a time, then whisk in the buttermilk last and slowly, which helps keep the mixture smooth.
- SeasoningThe original is unflavored, which is authentic but flat to modern taste. A grating of nutmeg on top, or the zest of a lemon in the sugar, is entirely in keeping with buttermilk pies of the period.
Buttermilk pie belongs to the family of "desperation" custards -- chess pie, vinegar pie, sugar pie -- built from the staples a farm kitchen always had when fresh cream and fruit were out of season. Buttermilk was the byproduct of butter-making rather than a purchase, so a pie like this cost little more than the sugar. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book, compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives to the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and supplied to purchasers of the flour on application in the 1910s, marks it as everyday household baking rather than company fare. The compressed style is typical of the book: contributors wrote for readers who had made custard pies all their lives and needed only the proportions.