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Chocolate Cream Pie
Moisten half a package of Larkin Prepared Chocolate Puddingpowder in a small quantity of milk. Scald the remainder of one pint of milk. Add the moistened powder and cook ten minutes. Pour into a baked pie-shell and cover with a meringue, made from the whites of two eggs beaten to a stiff froth, and one-half cup of granulated sugar. Spread over the cream and brown. Serve warm or cold.
A branded shortcut pie from the Larkin Company's own cookbook — the pudding powder it depends on has not been sold in a century, so the filling has to be rebuilt from scratch or from a current mix.
- The missing ingredientLarkin Prepared Chocolate Puddingpowder was one of the grocery lines the Larkin Soap Company sold to its club customers; it was presumably a starch-and-cocoa blend, though no exact formula is given here. "Half a package" is unrecoverable as an exact measure; a boxed cook-and-serve chocolate pudding made up with a pint of milk is the nearest modern stand-in, or make a scratch filling of about 1/4 cup cornstarch, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/3 cup cocoa and a pinch of salt per pint of milk.
- Slake before scaldingThe hinge of the method is moistening the powder in cold milk first. Starch and cocoa dumped into hot milk seize into lumps immediately, and no amount of whisking recovers them fully.
- Ten minutes is for a double boilerTen minutes -- The recipe does not say what pan or heat to use. A starch filling like this is easiest over gentle or indirect heat, since it catches quickly on a directly heated pan. Cook until it comes to a full boil and thickens visibly, then hold it bubbling a minute or two so the starch loses its raw taste.
- ScaldMilk heated to roughly 180F, when a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge of the pan. It should not reach a rolling boil.
- The pie-shellThe recipe calls only for a baked shell, so bake it through before filling; the filling is poured in, not baked in the crust. Brushing the shell with a little beaten egg white during its last minutes of baking helps keep it from going soft under the hot cream.
- Meringue proportionsTwo whites to half a cup of sugar is a generously sweetened meringue. Add the sugar a spoonful at a time once the whites hold soft peaks, and beat until the grains dissolve between your fingers, or the finished top will bead syrup.
- BrowningThe recipe gives no oven setting, only "brown": a moderate oven for several minutes, or a minute or two under a broiler watched constantly, will do it. Spread the meringue over filling that is still hot and seal it to the crust edge all round; that is what stops it weeping and shrinking.
- YieldA pint of milk suggests one standard pie of about 8 or 9 inches, six to eight slices. It cuts most cleanly cold, but the meringue is at its best within a few hours of baking.
The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York built its business selling soap by mail and giving away premiums — furniture, china, and its own line of grocery goods — to customers who bought in clubs. The source volume, generally identified as Good Things to Eat though that title was also carried by unrelated books of the period, belongs to that machinery: a cookbook whose recipes call, again and again, for Larkin's own extracts, baking powder and prepared puddings, so that the book itself functions as a catalogue. Prepared pudding powders were a genuine convenience of the period, a pre-measured blend that spared the cook weighing out starch and, one presumes, saved the expense of eggs in the filling. The result here is essentially a cornstarch chocolate pie, a lighter and cheaper relative of the egg-thickened chocolate custard pies of the nineteenth century, finished with the two whites the filling no longer needed.