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Cream Filling (Eggs cups milk teaspoon salt)
2 eggs 1½ cups milk teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon flavoring Mix cornstarch, sugar and eggs; add milk and butter; cook in double boiler twenty minutes, stirring constantly. Cool, add salt, flavoring, and spread between cakes. Curaçoa Filling Use rule for Cream Filling, adding one tablespoon orange curaçoa.
A standard pastry cream for layer cakes, but the printed ingredient list has lost lines in setting — the method calls for cornstarch, sugar and butter that never appear above it. Fill those in from ordinary practice before you begin.
- Missing quantitiesThe list gives only 2 eggs, 1½ cups milk, salt and flavoring, while the method also uses cornstarch, sugar and butter. The original amounts are genuinely lost here; a workable cream filling for this much milk runs to about 3 tablespoons cornstarch, ½ cup sugar and 1 tablespoon butter, but that is reconstruction rather than the book's figures.
- Salt"Teaspoon salt" in a filling of this size is almost certainly a fraction that dropped out in printing — read it as a small pinch. A full teaspoon in 1½ cups of milk would taste distinctly salty.
- Twenty minutes in a double boilerThat is right for the vessel, not excessive. Water-bath heat climbs slowly, and the cornstarch needs a long enough hold to thicken fully and lose its raw starch taste; sustained heat is also generally held to be what keeps a yolk-thickened cream from thinning again on standing.
- Stirring constantlyThe hinge of the recipe. Cornstarch and egg both catch on the sides of the upper pan; use a flat-ended spatula or whisk and keep the mixture moving into the corners, or you will strain out lumps later.
- Mixing orderCombine cornstarch and sugar dry, then beat in the eggs, then add the milk gradually. Cornstarch dropped into liquid eggs alone will seize into pellets.
- CoolingAdd the flavoring after cooking, as directed — vanilla and other extracts are largely alcohol and volatile oil, and boil away. Lay plastic wrap directly on the surface while it cools to keep a skin from forming.
- CuraçoaOrange curaçao, an orange-peel liqueur, still sold. One tablespoon added cold is enough to flavor without loosening the set.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough to fill one two- or three-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Use it the day it is made and keep it refrigerated; a milk-and-egg filling sours quickly at room temperature.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to a genre of promotional cookbooks that flourished around 1900 — free or cheap volumes issued by makers of chocolate, cornstarch, gelatin and baking powder to teach cooks to use their product. Cream filling of this kind, a cornstarch-thickened custard cooked over water, was a common American layer-cake filling of the period, and the book's habit of giving one "rule" and then a variation on it — here, add curaçao — reflects how such books were often organized: a small stock of base recipes with variations rung on them. The double boiler was widely used in turn-of-the-century kitchens working on coal and wood ranges, where direct heat was hard to moderate and a pan of water guarded against a scorched custard.