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Custard Pie (Eggs tablespoons sugar Pinch)
2 eggs 3 tablespoons sugar Pinch of salt 1½ cups milk Grated nutmeg or cinnamon Beat the eggs slightly; add the sugar, salt and milk. Line a pie plate with paste; strain in the mixture; sprinkle grated nut- When meg or cinnamon over the top and put in a quick oven. the edge of the crust begins to brown reduce the heat and bake till the custard is just set.
A plain baked custard pie, thin by modern standards and dependent almost entirely on oven management. The two-stage heat is the whole method.
- The hinge: two oven temperaturesThe hinge: two oven temperatures. Period cookbooks put a "quick oven" at roughly 400-450F, and it is there only long enough to set the bottom crust before the filling soaks it. Once the crust edge colours, reduce the heat -- a moderate oven, somewhere in the region of 325-350F -- and bake until the custard is just set. The recipe itself gives no figures.
- Judging "just set"The centre should still wobble as a unit when the plate is nudged; it firms as it cools. Baked past that point the egg proteins tighten and weep, and the pie turns watery in the plate. A knife inserted an inch from the centre coming out clean is the older test and is reliable.
- Paste"Paste" is plain pie pastry, not a sweetened dough. The book assumes you have a pastry recipe elsewhere in the leaves; any single-crust short pastry works.
- Strain in the mixtureNot optional. Straining catches chalazae and any set egg thread, which is the difference between a smooth slice and one flecked with rubbery specks.
- Proportions and quantityTwo eggs to 1 1/2 cups milk is a soft set, at the lower limit of what will hold a slice. It suits a shallow pie plate; in a modern 9-inch deep dish it will look sparse, and increasing the custard by half brings it closer to modern expectations.
- MilkThe recipe says only "milk"; whole milk is the assumption. With skimmed milk there is less fat to soften the set, and the pie will taste leaner and eggier.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the surface after the filling is in the shell, not into the mixture, so it stays on top and browns rather than settling out.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; a pie this size will cut into perhaps six modest wedges. Serve at room temperature or cold; a warm custard pie slices badly.
Custard pie is one of the oldest surviving English-American pie forms, descended from the medieval "custard" or "crustade" -- a pastry coffin filled with eggs and milk, whose crust served largely as a baking vessel. In loose-leaf household books of this kind, sold in binders so a cook could add her own pages, it had settled into exactly this shape: four cheap ingredients, no thickener, and a technique that must be learned rather than measured. The instruction to start hot and finish cool is the enduring lesson: it is the same problem quiche and creme caramel present, a liquid egg mixture sitting in a raw shell that needs more heat than the custard can bear.