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Maple Pie
1/2 cup milk 1/2 cup maple syrup 2 egg yolks, beaten 1 tablespoon gelatine 2 tablespoons cold water 1 cup cream, whipped 1/3 cup chopped nuts baked pie shell Heat milk and maple syrup in double boiler. Pour over beaten egg yolk and continue cooking until thick, stirring constantly. Remove from stove and add gelatine which has been soaked in cold water. Stir very well until dissolved. Let stand until it begins to thicken, then fold in the whipped cream and chopped nuts. Turn into baked pie shell. Makes one pie.
A gelatine chiffon pie built on a thin stirred custard rather than meringue, which makes it richer and less fragile than most pies of its type. The hinge is the custard: it must thicken over water without ever scrambling, since there is no flour or starch to protect the yolks.
- Custard stageCook the milk, syrup and yolks over simmering — not boiling — water until the mixture coats a spoon and reads about 175F. Stirring constantly is not optional here; unthickened by starch, the yolks will curdle in seconds at the edges.
- Gelatine quantityOne tablespoon is 3 teaspoons, slightly more than a modern envelope of powdered gelatine (2 1/4 teaspoons). Use one full envelope plus a scant 3/4 teaspoon, or accept a marginally softer set with a single envelope.
- Soaking the gelatineSprinkle it over the 2 tablespoons cold water and leave five minutes until it swells and looks pebbly before stirring it into the hot custard. Gelatine added dry to hot liquid clumps and will not dissolve smoothly.
- The folding window"Let stand until it begins to thicken" means the custard should have the body of raw egg white — cool to the touch, mounding faintly off the spoon. Fold in the cream too early and it deflates into a layer; too late and you get gelatine lumps through the filling.
- Maple syrupThe recipe assumes real maple syrup. Pancake syrups are corn syrup with flavouring and will read flat here, since maple carries most of what flavour the filling has.
- The creamOne cup of cream whips to roughly two cups. Leave it unsweetened — the syrup carries all the sugar this filling needs.
- Shell and chillingThe recipe does not give a size; the finished filling is about three cups, which suits an 8- or 9-inch baked shell, fully cooled. The original gives no chilling time: allow at least four hours refrigerated, and better overnight, before cutting.
- YieldOne pie, six to eight slices. The recipe says only 'chopped nuts'; walnuts or pecans suit it. If you toast them, cool them completely first, or the warm nuts will slacken the setting gelatine.
Gelatine chiffon pies belong to the decades when packaged granulated gelatine turned a laborious calf's-foot job into a spoonful from a box, and cooks used it to make fillings that were light, cold and set without a long bake. The maple flavouring points to North American practice, where maple syrup served as a straightforward sweetener rather than a luxury. Chiffon fillings of this kind are close cousins to the Bavarian cream -- custard lightened with whipped cream and held with gelatine -- repackaged for a pie shell.