Custard Pie
Use Plain or Chopped Paste. For filling, mix three eggs, one fourth cup sugar, one eighth teaspoon salt, one eighth teaspoon nutmeg, and two cups milk. Bake in slow oven.
A bare-bones formula of the kind that assumes the cook already knows how custard behaves. The proportions are sound; what the original leaves out is temperature, time, and the crust problem.
- The hinge: low heat, stop earlyEgg custard sets at 170-180F and curdles not far above that, which is why the book says slow oven. Take the pie out when the outer inch is set and the centre still shivers as a coin-sized circle; carryover heat finishes it. A fully firm centre in the oven is a weeping, pitted custard on the table.
- "Slow oven"Around 300-325F. At that heat a nine-inch pie runs roughly 35 to 50 minutes. A modern approach is to start hotter, about 425F for the first ten minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325F for the rest.
- Plain or Chopped PasteBoth are pie pastries given elsewhere in the book: plain paste is the standard rubbed-in short crust, chopped paste has the fat cut in coarsely with a knife for a flakier result. Any single-crust pastry for a nine-inch plate does the job here.
- The soggy bottomA wet custard poured into raw pastry is the classic cause of an underbaked base. Blind-bake the shell until dry and just colouring, then brush the inside with a little beaten egg white and return it to the oven for a minute to seal before filling.
- Scald and strainHeating the milk to just below a simmer before whisking it slowly into the eggs shortens the bake and gives a smoother set. Strain the mixture into the shell to catch chalazae and any threads of cooked egg.
- NutmegAn eighth teaspoon is a whisper. The recipe mixes it into the custard; grating it fresh over the surface after filling instead will let it brown attractively.
- Yield and keepingOne nine-inch pie, six to eight slices. Cool completely before cutting or it will run, and refrigerate anything not eaten within two hours - a baked custard is still a perishable egg-and-milk dish.
Custard pie is one of the oldest continuously made English-American pies, descended from the medieval "custarde" - a pastry coffin filled with a sweetened egg and cream mixture; the word appears to come through Middle English crustade from Old French, ultimately from crouste, a crust. By the time Maria Willett Howard compiled Lowney's Cook Book for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in the early 1900s, it was so thoroughly domestic that it needed no explanation at all: three eggs, some milk, a grating of nutmeg, and an assumption that the reader had a pastry recipe already at hand. The terseness is the point. Corporate cookbooks of the period often served as vehicles for the sponsor's product, and pages given over to a plain custard show how much a general cookbook was expected to cover before it got to the chocolate.