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Vanilla Cream Pie
2 cups milk 1/2 cup flour 1/2 cup sugar 1 tablespoon butter 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla 2 tablespoons powdered sugar Pastry Scald the milk. Mix the dry ingredients together. Add the scalded milk slowly, stirring all the time. Return to the double boiler and cook twenty to twenty-five minutes, stirring often. Add the vanilla and salt, and pour into a baked crust. Make a meringue of whipped cream, vegetable gelatine and the powdered sugar. Place on top of the filled pie.
An eggless pastry cream thickened entirely with flour, set in a pre-baked shell and topped with stabilized whipped cream. Two ingredients in the list need translating before you start.
- Vegetable gelatineIn cookbooks of this period this usually means agar-agar, sold as flakes or powder in Asian groceries and health-food shops. Unlike gelatin it must be brought to a boil in liquid to dissolve, and it sets firm at room temperature, so it has to be folded into the cream while still warm and worked quickly. The recipe gives no quantity; something on the order of 1/4 teaspoon of powder softened and boiled in a tablespoon or two of the cream should be enough for a cup of whipped cream.
- Pastry means a blind-baked shellThe instruction is "pour into a baked crust" — the filling never sees the oven, so the shell must be fully baked and cooled first. The quantity suits roughly a 9-inch shell, though the recipe specifies no size and gives no yield; six to eight servings is a reasonable guess.
- No eggs, so the flour does everythingHalf a cup of flour to two cups of milk is a stiff ratio, and that is deliberate: without yolks the starch is the only thing setting the pie. Do not reduce it or the filling will slump when cut.
- Lump prevention is the hingeMix the flour, sugar and salt dry and thoroughly, then add the scalded milk in a thin stream while stirring. Flour dumped into hot milk seizes instantly and no amount of later stirring will fix it.
- Twenty-five minutes is not a misprintOver a double boiler the mixture stays below boiling, and raw flour needs a long cook to lose its pasty taste and reach full thickening power. A direct-heat shortcut risks scorching; in a heavy saucepan over low heat it will thicken in a fraction of the time, with constant stirring.
- Salt and vanilla twice overThe salt appears in both the dry mixing and the finishing step. Add it at the beginning with the flour and sugar. The vanilla goes in off the heat, as written, since prolonged cooking drives off the aromatics.
- "Meringue" here means no egg whitesThe topping is whipped cream sweetened with powdered sugar and held up by agar rather than beaten whites. Chill the cream and bowl, whip to soft peaks, then fold in the dissolved agar; over-whipping after the agar goes in gives a grainy texture.
- ChillingThe original gives no cooling time. The filling needs several hours refrigerated to set cleanly, and the topping should go on once the filling is cold, not while it is still warm.
Meatless cookbooks of this period served two overlapping audiences: vegetarians on principle, and households urged to spare meat, eggs and fats. That double purpose may explain the shape of this pie. A conventional vanilla cream pie of the period leaned on egg yolks for body and beaten whites for the meringue; this version substitutes flour for the yolks and agar-stiffened cream for the whites, arriving at something recognizable without touching an egg. Agar — "vegetable gelatine" or sometimes "Japanese isinglass" — is a seaweed extract that reached Western kitchens through Japanese and Chinese trade in the nineteenth century, and it was promoted in reform and vegetarian cookery precisely because ordinary gelatin is boiled from animal bones and hides. The result is a useful marker of how far a period cook would go to keep the familiar dessert while changing everything underneath it.