Cream Pie
One quart morning's milk, 1 cupful sugar, yolks of six eggs, three tablespoonfuls sifted flour. Boil twenty minutes, after seasoning with nutmeg, wine, and vanilla or lemon. Have rich pastry already baked, in deep pie plates. Fill with the above mixture and bake. Make a meringue of the whites and some sugar, pour over the pie, and set it in the stove again to brown.--Mrs. T.
Cream Pie.
One-half pound butter, four eggs, sugar and nutmeg to taste, two tablespoonfuls flour well mixed with milk. Pour over it one quart boiling milk, stir all together and bake in deep dishes--Mrs. A. B.
Two contributed versions of the same idea, printed one after the other. The first is a workable stirred custard; the second is a set of proportions rather than a method, and needs judgment to fill in.
- Morning's milkMilk from the morning milking, used the same day before the cream had fully risen and been skimmed. Whole milk is the closest modern equivalent; a quart with a splash of cream added is closer still to a farm dairy's product.
- Boil twenty minutesThis is the instruction to ignore. Yolks and flour in milk thicken in five to eight minutes over medium heat, stirring constantly, and twenty minutes of hard boiling will scramble the eggs and scorch the bottom. Cook until it coats a spoon thickly, then stop.
- Season before, not afterSeason at the end, not at the start -- The recipe has the nutmeg, wine and vanilla or lemon going in before the twenty-minute boil. Add them after cooking instead: alcohol and vanilla both flash off with prolonged heat, and the flavour is why the pie is worth making.
- WineIn a Virginia kitchen of this date this most likely means a fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira rather than table wine, though the recipe does not specify. Two to three tablespoons is enough for a quart of custard.
- Rich pastry, already bakedThe shell is blind-baked before filling. Note that the recipe then bakes the filled pie again before the meringue goes on top, and returns it to the oven a third time to brown, so the custard is not merely warmed through. Bake the shell fully at 400F, docked and weighted.
- "Set it in the stove"The oven of a wood or coal range. For the meringue, 350F for 12-15 minutes, or 400F for 6-8 if you want a darker, softer-centred top.
- The meringueSix whites take about three-quarters of a cup of sugar. Spread it so it touches the pastry rim all the way round, which stops it shrinking and weeping onto the custard.
- The second version is incompleteMrs. A. B. gives no baking time, no temperature, no quantity for the sugar, and half a pound of butter to a quart of milk is very rich even by the standards of the page. Read it as a variant on the first rather than a standalone recipe.
- YieldA quart of custard fills two deep nine-inch shells, eight to twelve servings. Both pies want thorough chilling before cutting.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by some 250 ladies of Virginia and her sister states, which is why the same dish appears twice in a row under different initials with no attempt to reconcile them. "Cream pie" in the nineteenth century meant a blind-baked shell filled with a stirred, flour-thickened custard and topped with meringue, and it is often said to be the ancestor of the coconut and banana cream pies of the following century, which simply add fruit or shredded coconut to the same base. The reliance on "morning's milk" and on a quart of it at a time points to a household with its own cow: before commercial dairying, the richness of a custard depended on which milking it came from and how long the cream had been allowed to rise, and cookbooks of the period can be read as specifying this in something like the way a modern one specifies fat percentages.