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Butterscotch Pie (Heaping T brown sugar Put)
1 heaping T butter. 1 heaping T brown sugar Put in pan over fire until dark brown 2 egg yolks 2 T flour Mrs. Anna Suydam. ½ C brown sugar 2/3 C sweet milk Stir other ingredients into the caramel until thickened and pour in baked pie crust shell. Frost with egg whites.
Mrs. A. W. Waldo.
The typesetting here has collapsed two contributors' cards into one block, with ingredients and directions interleaved out of order. The method is a standard cooked butterscotch cream filling in a pre-baked shell, and it works once the lines are sorted.
- Reading the jumbleThe lines can be read as: 1 heaping tablespoon brown sugar burned to a caramel, then 1½ cups brown sugar, 2/3 cup milk, 2 tablespoons flour and 2 egg yolks stirred into it. Two names are attached to the block; whether two separate cards were run together in setting, or one name belongs to part of the method, cannot be told from the page.
- AbbreviationsT is tablespoon, C is cup. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that many recipes in these books call for.
- Burning the sugarThe heaping tablespoon of brown sugar melted "until dark brown" is the whole point of the flavor. Dry sugar goes from dark to acrid in seconds over direct heat, and scorched caramel will make the entire filling bitter.
- The missing butterMany butterscotch fillings of this period included butter, and this card omits it. Without butter the filling tastes of caramel rather than butterscotch.
- Liquid is scant as writtenTwo-thirds of a cup of milk against 1½ cups of sugar and 2 tablespoons flour will set very stiff, near the texture of a soft candy. Other butterscotch fillings generally call for considerably more milk; the low figure here may be an omission, and it is worth judging the consistency as it thickens rather than trusting the numbers.
- ThickeningWhisk the yolks with the flour and a little cold milk before they meet the hot caramel, or the yolks will scramble. A double boiler makes the difference between a smooth custard and a grainy one.
- The frosting"Frost with egg whites" means a meringue: beat the two reserved whites to soft peaks with about 2 tablespoons sugar each, pile it on the warm filling sealed to the crust edge, and brown it in a moderate oven (about 350F for 12 to 15 minutes) -- the card itself gives neither temperature nor time. Left unbaked it is raw egg white and will weep within the hour.
- YieldProbably one 8- or 9-inch pie. The shell must be fully baked beforehand, since nothing goes back into the oven except the meringue.
Butterscotch pie belongs to the large American family of stovetop cream pies that filled a baked shell with a cooked custard, then crowned it with the leftover whites as meringue -- an arrangement that wasted nothing and used ingredients any pantry held: brown sugar, flour, milk, eggs. The name is often connected with nineteenth-century British toffee made with butter and brown sugar, though the origin of the word is not settled. Community fundraising cookbooks tend to be terse, the contributors assuming a shared body of knowledge, and garbled setting of the kind seen in this run-together block is common in them.