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Caramel Pie
Put in a pan to boil 1 cup brown sugar and butter the size of an egg, then thin out with 1 cup hot water. Mix 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 1 teaspoon vanilla, yolks of 2 eggs with water and stir in. Have crust ready and pour filling in, using the whites of eggs on top.
A butterscotch pie in all but name, written for a cook who already knew what a cooked custard filling should look like. The recipe leaves out several things a modern reader will want stated.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Older books measured fat by comparison to an egg, a walnut or a pea, each standing for a different quantity; here anything from 3 to 5 tablespoons will behave the same.
- Boil the sugar first, and mean itThe recipe does say to boil the brown sugar and butter before the hot water goes in, and much of the flavour comes from letting them bubble together until they darken and smell nutty, though the book gives no indication how far to take them. Add the water off the heat and at arm's length, since it will spit.
- Slake the cornstarch"With water" means a few tablespoons of cold water, enough to make a smooth thin paste with the starch and yolks. Lumps are permanent once they hit hot syrup.
- The filling must be cooked, not just stirred inThe instruction to "stir in" understates it. Return the pan to the heat and cook, stirring, until the mixture thickens and the starch loses its raw taste, about two minutes at a bare simmer. Unthickened filling will not set in the shell.
- Temper the yolksWhisk a ladle of the hot syrup into the yolk-and-starch mixture before returning it all to the pan, or the yolks scramble into threads.
- Hold the vanilla backStir it in at the very end. Boiled through the syrup, most of its aroma is gone.
- The crustNo size or oven heat is given. What the method needs is a fully blind-baked single shell: roughly 425F for 12 to 15 minutes with weights, then a few minutes more uncovered. A hot filling in raw pastry gives a soggy base.
- The meringueThe recipe assumes you know the rest: beat the two whites to soft peaks with about 4 tablespoons of sugar, spread to touch the crust all round, and bake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes until set and lightly coloured.
- YieldThe tin size is not given; the quantities suit a smallish pie of about 8 to 9 inches, six to eight servings. Chill several hours before cutting or it will slump.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg as advertising for its Five Roses flour, and like most milling-company books it was built largely from recipes contributed by customers across Canada — which is why the instructions read like a note passed between neighbours rather than a tested formula. Despite the name, there is no caramel in the confectioner's sense here: in North American home baking of the period "caramel" was often used loosely for the flavour of browned brown sugar and butter, and pies of this kind circulated under the names caramel pie, brown sugar pie and butterscotch pie. The style belongs to a broad family of cornstarch-thickened custard pies that became common once boxed cornstarch was a cheap pantry staple in the later nineteenth century, giving cooks a filling that set without the long slow baking a plain egg custard demands — and, conveniently, one that used the yolks while the whites went on top as meringue.