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Custard Pie
Line a deep pie plate with good pie crust and grate a little nutmeg on the crust. Beat 3 eggs with½ cup sugar, add ½ cup cream and milk enough to fill the crust (about 1 pint). Bake in moderate oven just to the boiling point. Serve cold.
Or, reserve the whites of 3 eggs and, when the custard is done, beat the whites to a froth and spread on top. Add a little sugar to the whites and return to the oven and brown slightly.
Note on Custard Pies-For custard and fresh fruit pies, it is advisable to have paste very cold and firm and to have a quick oven; otherwise, the liquid will soak in and the crust be heavy or soggy.
A plain baked custard pie, with the option of a meringue top. The whole thing hinges on temperature control: custard sets around 170-180F and curdles above that, so "just to the boiling point" means pull it before the center puffs and cracks.
- Oven temperatures"moderate" in books of this period is usually taken as roughly 350F, and a "quick oven" as somewhere around 400-450F. One common modern approach is to start hot for about 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325-350F to finish the custard gently.
- "Just to the boiling point"Do not take this literally. The filling is done when the outer inch is set and the center still trembles like loose jelly, roughly 170-175F at the middle. Custard that actually boils weeps and goes grainy; it carries over several degrees as it cools.
- The soggy-crust problemThe note at the end is the most useful line in the recipe. Chill the lined shell until firm, and blind-bake it to a pale set before the custard goes in, then pour the filling in while the shell is still hot. The grated nutmeg on the crust does nothing to seal it, but a thin brush of beaten egg white does.
- Liquid quantityAbout 1 pint total (2 cups) of cream and milk for 3 eggs is a soft, delicate set. A deep 9-inch plate will take closer to 2 1/2 cups plus a fourth egg if you want it to slice cleanly.
- CreamCream of this period was often richer than supermarket half-and-half. Use heavy cream for the 1/2 cup and whole milk for the rest; skim milk gives a thin, watery custard.
- The meringue versionThree whites want 4 to 6 tablespoons of sugar, beaten to soft peaks. Spread it on the custard while the pie is still warm and seal it to the crust edge all around, or it will shrink and weep. Brown at 350-400F for a few minutes only.
- Cooling and yieldServes 8 from a deep 9-inch plate. "Serve cold" is right: the custard firms as it chills, and cutting warm gives a puddle. Refrigerate once cool and eat within two days.
Custard pie is one of the oldest things in the English-language baking repertoire, descended from the medieval "custarde" or open-faced flan whose name is generally traced, by way of dictionary reconstruction, to Middle English crustade, from Old French crouste or croustade, a crust. By the time the Five Roses book was compiled for Canadian home bakers, this was pantry cooking of the plainest sort: eggs, milk, sugar, nutmeg, and whatever pastry was already on hand, with a meringue variation made from the whites of the same three eggs. The appended note on cold paste and a hot oven is the practical heart of the entry and reflects the era's real difficulty with wood- and coal-fired ranges, where holding a moderate heat long enough to set a custard without soaking the bottom crust took judgment rather than a dial. Nutmeg on a custard is traditional rather than incidental, and its pairing with milk puddings and possets goes back centuries in British cookery.