Custard Pie
2 cups milk 1 teaspoon Gold Medal flour 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 3 eggs 1/2 teaspoon flavoring extract Line a deep pie plate with plain paste. Rub the flour smooth with 1/2 cup cold milk, add to the remainder of the milk scalded; cook five minutes. Beat the eggs and combine with sugar and salt. Pour the milk mixture over this slowly, add flavoring, strain into the plate. Bake slowly. It is done when the knife blade makes a clean cut.
A plain baked custard in a pastry shell, from a flour-company promotional book. The whole difficulty is heat: custard sets at a much lower temperature than pastry browns at, and the original recipe's only guidance is "bake slowly."
- Oven temperature"Bake slowly" points to what period books called a slow oven, conventionally somewhere in the region of 300-325°F; in any case keep it below about 350°F, since above that the egg proteins tighten and squeeze out liquid, and the filling weeps and curdles rather than setting smooth.
- The doneness test, correctedA knife that "makes a clean cut" in the center means the custard is already slightly overbaked, since it keeps cooking after it leaves the oven. Test an inch from the edge instead and pull the pie when the center still wobbles as a set mass; 175–180°F on an instant-read thermometer is the reliable version of the same test.
- Soggy bottomPouring raw liquid custard into raw pastry is the classic recipe's weakness. Blind-bake the shell at 400°F until dry and just coloring, then lower the oven and fill it while both crust and custard are still warm.
- Flavoring extractIn a book of this period this usually meant vanilla, sometimes lemon or almond. Half a teaspoon of vanilla is the likely intended reading; grated nutmeg over the surface before baking is a traditional finish, though this version omits it.
- Why the teaspoon of flourOne teaspoon in two cups of milk is far too little to thicken anything. Starch is known to make egg custards more forgiving of heat, though at this dose the effect can only be slight; it is hard not to suspect the sponsor's product is the real reason it is there.
- Scalding and temperingScald the milk to just below a simmer, then add it to the beaten eggs in a slow stream while whisking, as written. Dumping it in at once will scramble the eggs, and the straining step will not rescue them.
- Pan and yieldA "deep pie plate" here probably means something around 9 inches; two cups of milk and three eggs will not fill a modern deep-dish 10-inch pan. Serves six to eight, and it cuts cleanly only after cooling to room temperature.
- StorageAn egg-and-milk pie is a perishable one. Refrigerate within two hours of baking and eat within three days.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was published by the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis — the miller that later became General Mills — and belongs to a whole genre of early twentieth-century cookbooks given away or sold cheaply by manufacturers, in which every recipe calling for flour names the brand. That is why a custard filling that needs no flour at all contains one careful teaspoon of it. The dish itself is far older than the book: a sweetened egg-and-milk filling baked in pastry descends from the medieval crustade, a word formed in turn from crust, and the pastry shell is often said to have begun life as a container for cooking rather than something to be eaten. By the time this book appeared, custard pie was ordinary American home baking, valued because it used pantry staples and could be assembled in the time it took the oven to come to heat.