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Cream Pie
A cream pie without cream makes a dainty dessert. Line a deep plate with good paste, pricking it in several places with a fork to let the air out and prevent blisters, and bake a delicate brown. To make the filling, put over the fire in a double boiler one large cup of milk. Stir together half a cup of sugar, a piece of butter the size of a walnut, a small half cup of flour, one tablespoon of cold milk and the yolks of two well-beaten eggs.
Mix until they are thoroughly blended, and add them to the milk when it boils.
Stir until it thickens, and when the flour is cooked take from the fire and flavor with vanilla. Fill the crust that has been baked with custard, beat the whites of the eggs to a froth, and add to them two tablespoons of powdered sugar; cover the top of the pie with them and brown lightly in the oven. The custard may be flavored with chocolate to make a change.
A blind-baked shell filled with stovetop pastry cream and topped with meringue. The old-fashioned measurements are loose but workable, and the one thing that decides whether it sets is how long you cook the flour.
- Cook the flour outOnce the egg-and-flour paste goes into the boiling milk, keep stirring over the heat until the mixture is thick and no longer tastes chalky " that means holding it at a bare simmer for two to three minutes after it thickens. Pulled too early, the custard is pasty and may thin out again as it cools.
- "Butter the size of a walnut"Usually taken as about 1 tablespoon (15 g), though period books are not consistent and some intend rather more. Butter was commonly measured by comparison to nuts and eggs before it was sold in stamped, uniform sticks.
- Cup sizes"One large cup" of milk is roughly 1 cup plus a little, say 250 ml; "a small half cup" of flour is a slightly under-filled half cup, around 55-60 g. The proportions are forgiving -- more flour makes a firmer, sliceable filling, less makes it spoonable.
- Blind bakingPrick the shell all over and bake until evenly browned; a modern oven at around 400F for 15 to 20 minutes will do it. Pie weights or dried beans on parchment hold the base flatter than pricking alone.
- Browning the meringueTwo egg whites with 2 tablespoons powdered sugar is a soft, lean meringue that colors fast. A hot oven, around 400F for about 5 minutes, browns it before the custard beneath goes runny; watch it, since the recipe asks only for a light browning. Spread it to touch the crust all round so it does not shrink and weep.
- Fill it warmLadle the custard into the shell while it is still warm and put the meringue straight on top. Meringue applied to cold custard tends to slide and leak liquid underneath.
- Chocolate variationFor the chocolate version, melt 1 to 2 oz unsweetened chocolate into the hot milk before adding the egg mixture, and increase the sugar slightly.
- YieldThe quantity of custard suits a smallish deep plate, roughly an 8-inch pie, cutting into about six servings. Because the filling is egg-thickened, keep leftovers refrigerated.
The opening line -- "a cream pie without cream" -- is the point of the recipe in a period when fresh cream was a luxury of the dairy-keeping household and city milk was of uncertain quality. Flour-and-egg pastry cream, the French crème pâtissière in plain American dress, gave the richness of cream from a cup of milk, two yolks and a spoonful of butter, and fillings of this kind underlie the American cream pie, Boston cream pie and the later banana and coconut versions. A double boiler kept the custard away from the fierce, uneven heat of a coal or wood range, where it would scorch before it thickened. Topping the pie with the leftover whites was thrift as much as decoration.