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Carrot Pie
1 cup cooked carrots (mashed) ½ cup sugar 2 eggs 1 pint sweet milk 2 tablespoons molasses 1 teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon ginger.
Bake in one crust. Molasses may be omitted.
A pumpkin-pie custard built on carrot, from an era when root cellars outlasted the squash. The original assumes you know how a custard pie behaves; the notes below fill in what it leaves out.
- The hinge: bake it low and stop earlyThis is a custard, so heat control decides everything. Start at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the pastry, drop to 325-350F for a further 35-45 minutes, and pull the pie when the outer inch is set but a circle in the centre still wobbles. It finishes cooking on the rack; baked until the middle is firm, it will weep and crack.
- "1 pint sweet milk"Two cups. "Sweet" simply means fresh rather than soured or buttermilk, a distinction that mattered when milk turned in a day. Whole milk is the closest match; a cup of milk and a cup of cream gives a richer set.
- "Bake in one crust"A single bottom crust, no lid. No size is given; a 9-inch plate is the usual assumption, though the filling is on the generous side for a shallow one. Because the filling is thin and wet, part-baking the shell for 10 minutes with weights before filling is worth the trouble.
- The carrotsA cup of mashed cooked carrot means boiled or steamed until quite soft, then pushed through a sieve or beaten smooth. Any fibre left in shows up as strings in the sliced pie. Roughly 3 medium carrots.
- Salt is missingThe filling calls for none. A quarter teaspoon in the custard sharpens both the spice and the carrot.
- MolassesThe recipe offers it as optional, and it is doing colour and depth rather than sweetness. Use unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which will dominate two cups of milk.
- The stray last line"2 eggs 1 cup sugar" at the end appears to be a stray line, either a duplication or the opening of the next recipe. Ignore it; the pie needs 2 eggs and 1/2 cup sugar.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Cool completely before cutting, and refrigerate leftovers, as with any egg-and-milk custard.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal and distributed to buyers of Five Roses flour, its recipes gathered from Canadian housewives across the country; the result reads as a national inventory of what people actually cooked in the years around the First World War. Carrot pie sits in it for practical reasons. Carrots kept in a sand-filled root cellar from October to spring, and the same custard formula of sweetened, spiced puree bound with eggs and milk was simply swung onto whichever root or gourd was still sound. Sweet pies made from roots are much older than either: early modern English cookery used parsnip and carrot as sweeteners in tarts long before cane sugar was cheap, and the tradition survived quietly in North American farm kitchens. The optional molasses is a period marker too, cheaper than sugar and a standard household darkener.