Cream Pie
Use rule for Orange Cake. Fill with cream filling, and sprinkle top with powdered sugar. ½ cup butter 1½ cups brown sugar 2 eggs ½ cup milk + teaspoon salt
This is a cross-reference recipe: the cake itself comes from the book's Orange Cake rule, and the only new work here is the filling and the sugared top. What is called a pie is really a filled layer cake, baked in round tins and split or stacked.
- "Rule" means recipeNineteenth-century American cookbooks use rule for a formula or recipe. You need the Orange Cake entry from the same section to make this at all.
- Cream filling means pastry creamCream filling -- in books of this period this generally means a cooked custard of milk, sugar, egg and flour or cornstarch, boiled until thickened; the book will have its own cream filling rule to follow. Cool it completely, with the surface covered, before it goes near the cake, or it will soak the crumb and slump out the sides.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period the term usually means what we now sell as confectioners' or icing sugar, though some older texts use it for a fine granulated grade. Sift it over the cake just before serving; on a custard-filled cake it dissolves into damp patches within an hour or two.
- Pans and ovenThe recipe gives no tin size, oven heat or baking time; those belong to the Orange Cake rule it refers you to. As a modern equivalent, two 8- or 9-inch round layer tins, buttered and floured, at about 350F for 25 to 30 minutes will serve. Cool the layers fully before filling.
- Keep it coldA milk-and-egg filling is perishable. Assemble as close to serving as you can manage and refrigerate any that is left rather than holding the finished cake at room temperature.
- YieldProbably one two-layer cake, eight to ten servings; the book does not say.
The name is the puzzle: a cream pie of this kind contains no pastry and is not baked in a crust. The usual explanation, traditional rather than documented, is that New England households baked plain butter cakes in the shallow tin pie plates they already owned, split them, filled them with boiled custard, and kept calling the result a pie -- the same lineage that produced Boston cream pie. Lowney's book belongs to the era of the chocolate-company cookbook, published to put a manufacturer's product into home kitchens, and recipes like this one work by cross-reference, sending the cook to a base cake rule and varying only what goes between the layers and what is scattered on top.