Custard Pie
One quart milk, five eggs, five tablespoonfuls sugar; flavor with lemon. Bake slowly, half an hour.--Mrs. M. B. B.
A bare-bones formula of the kind that assumes the cook already knows how a custard pie is assembled. The instructions cover the filling only; everything about the crust is left to you.
- The hinge: low heat, and stop at 175FCustard sets by coagulation, not by browning, and a few degrees too far turns it grainy and weeping. Pull the pie when the outer inch is set and the center still wobbles as a single mass; an instant-read thermometer should show 175-180F about an inch from the edge.
- "Bake slowly"In a wood range this meant a slack or cooling oven; the book gives no temperatures, and modern equivalents of roughly 300-325F are only an approximation. Half an hour at that heat is unlikely to set a full quart of custard in a deep shell; allow longer, and judge by the center rather than the clock.
- The crust is assumedA quart of milk plus five eggs makes a generous quantity of filling, likely more than a single 9-inch shell will hold; two shallower shells are the safer division. Custard fillings soak pastry, so blind-bake the shell until dry and pour the custard in while the crust is still hot.
- The egg ratio is leanFive eggs to four cups of milk is thinner than most modern custard pie recipes. The result is soft and barely sliceable in a deep pie; baked in two shallow shells it behaves much better.
- Five tablespoonfuls sugarAbout a third of a cup for the whole quart, which is markedly less sweet than a twentieth-century custard pie. Nineteenth-century tablespoons were not standardized and could run somewhat larger than the modern 15 ml, so treat the figure as approximate.
- "Flavor with lemon"Either a teaspoon of lemon extract or the grated zest of one lemon steeped in warmed milk and strained out. Avoid juice: the acid can curdle the milk before it reaches the oven.
- Scald and strainHeating the milk to just below a simmer before whisking it into the eggs shortens the bake and gives a smoother set. Strain the mixture and skim the foam, or the surface bakes up pitted.
- ServingCool to room temperature before cutting, then refrigerate; a warm custard pie slices into a puddle. Grated nutmeg is a common finish on custard pies of the period, though this recipe does not call for it. Serves six to eight.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathers contributions credited on its title page to some two hundred and fifty ladies of Virginia and her sister states, and is built out of exactly this kind of entry: a name, a proportion, a method in one clause, and a set of initials. The brevity reads less as carelessness than as an assumption of shared knowledge, a cook already familiar with custard needing the ratio and little else. Baked custard pies belong to a very old European line of egg-and-milk tarts, and in the American South they were a standard use for a household's surplus of eggs and fresh milk, cheap to make and gentle enough to be fed to invalids and children. The direction to bake slowly is the one piece of real technique the contributor thought worth writing down.