Custard Pie
Four eggs Two and one-half cups of milk Two-thirds of a cup of sugar One-fourth teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt One-fourth teaspoon of Larkin Nutmeg Beat the eggs and sugar. Add a portion of the milk. Pour into a pie plate lined with paste, add the remainder of the milk and bake in moderate oven onehalf hour or until the custard is firm.
A plain single-crust custard pie of the sort that appears in nearly every American household book of the period. The proportions are sound; almost everything that can go wrong is a matter of oven heat and knowing when to stop.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" in a book of this vintage is 350F. Many modern custard pies start hotter (about 425F for the first 10-15 minutes) to set the crust, then drop to 325-350F; baking the whole time at 350F works but gives a softer bottom.
- Pie plate sizeFour eggs and two and a half cups of milk make roughly three cups of filling, which suits a 9-inch plate; an 8-inch plate is likely to be too small. Adding the last of the milk after the shell is in place also makes a brim-full plate easier to handle, though the recipe does not say why it splits the pouring.
- Know when it is done"Until the custard is firm" overshoots. Pull the pie when the outer two inches are set and the center still wobbles as a single mass; carryover heat finishes it. A thermometer in the center should read about 175F. Fully firm in the oven means weeping and a watery layer under the crust by the next day.
- Half an hour is optimisticAt 350F in a 9-inch plate, expect 40-50 minutes. Start checking at 30 if your oven runs hot.
- Soggy bottomThe original pours liquid custard into raw pastry. Partly blind-baking the shell (about 15 minutes at 400F with weights, until dry and just coloring) and filling it while still warm gives a much better base.
- Beating the eggsBeat only until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture is even. Whipping in air produces foam that bakes into a pocked, bubbled surface.
- Larkin salt and nutmegLarkin was a Buffalo mail-order house that sold its own line of groceries and spices; the brand names are advertising, not a special product. Use ordinary fine salt and, if you can, nutmeg grated fresh over the surface after the filling is in the shell so it stays on top.
- MilkWhole milk is what the recipe assumes. Skim milk gives a thin, watery set; swapping half a cup of the milk for cream makes a richer pie without changing the setting behavior.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Cool completely before cutting, and refrigerate any that is left -- an egg-and-milk custard should not sit out.
Custard pie is one of the oldest dishes in the English-American baking repertoire, descended from the medieval "custarde" or "crustade" -- a word that originally named the pastry case rather than the filling, from the same root as crust. By the nineteenth century it had settled into the form given here: eggs, milk, sugar, a little salt, nutmeg on top, one crust and no lid. Its appearance in a promotional cookbook like this one is telling. Larkin, a Buffalo soap manufacturer that expanded into mail-order groceries and spices, gave away recipe booklets in which its own salt and nutmeg were written directly into the ingredient list, and a pie needing only pantry staples and a moderate oven was ideal for the purpose. Nutmeg's place in the recipe is older than the branding: it had been the standard flavoring for baked and boiled milk custards in English kitchens for centuries, and the grating over the top was as much a mark of a finished custard as it was a seasoning.