Date Pie
Use Plain Paste. Add one and one half cups of dates, which have been cooked in boiling water until tender and pressed through a sieve, to Custard Pie filling.
This is a shorthand entry that assumes you have two other recipes from the book in front of you: Plain Paste (a basic single pie crust) and Custard Pie filling (eggs, sugar, milk, salt, often a grating of nutmeg). What follows is what the entry leaves unsaid.
- The two borrowed recipesPlain Paste is a basic flour-fat-water pastry; the entry does not say how large a shell it makes. A custard filling of this period would typically run in the region of 3 eggs, 1/3 cup sugar, a pinch of salt and 2 cups scalded milk, though Lowney's own proportions are not quoted here. The date puree is most easily stirred in with the milk.
- The hinge: don't let the custard boilA custard pie sets at roughly 175F in the centre. Past that the eggs curdle and the filling weeps, and the date puree makes weeping harder to spot. Pull it when a knife slid in an inch from the centre comes out clean and the middle still trembles.
- Oven heatThe entry gives none. In modern terms, a custard pie is usually started hot, around 450F for about 10 minutes to set the pastry, then dropped to 325-350F for 25-35 minutes to finish the filling gently.
- Soggy bottomA wet filling in a raw shell is the standing problem. Partly blind-bake the crust and brush the hot base with beaten egg white before filling, or bake on a preheated steel or stone in the lower third of the oven.
- Pressed through a sieveThis means a smooth puree. Simmer the pitted dates in just enough water to cover, 10-15 minutes until collapsing, then blitz in a food processor or push through a mesh sieve. Drain off excess water first or the custard will be slack.
- The dates themselvesUse pitted dates such as Deglet Noor or Medjool. Note that the recipe's measure reads as one and a half cups of the cooked, sieved fruit, so start with rather more whole dates than that. Modern dates may be sweeter than you expect, so taste the puree before deciding how much sugar the custard needs.
- YieldProbably one standard pie of six to eight slices, though no size is given. Cool completely before cutting; a custard pie sliced warm will not hold its edge.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is a full general cookbook rather than a candy pamphlet, and its dessert chapter is organized in a way that was common enough at the time: a handful of master recipes followed by one-line variations built on top of them. Date Pie is a variation twice over, borrowing both crust and filling. Dates had become a familiar grocery item in the United States by this point, imported dried from North Africa and the Persian Gulf and sold pressed into blocks, and the first commercial date plantings in California's Coachella Valley date from around the turn of the century. Their appeal to a household cook was that they sweetened a dish on their own.