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Apple Custard
2 cups apples. 3 egg yolks. 1 cup sugar. 1 tablespoon butter. Pinch salt. Season with nutmeg and cinnamon.
Stew apples until tender; run through sieve.
Pinch salt, season with nutmeg and cinnamon. If meringue is desired, beat three full tablespoons sugar into the three whites; bake in pastry.
This is one of the badly compressed entries in Mrs. Wilson's book — the seasoning instruction is printed twice, the assembly is barely sketched, and it has been set under Vegetables rather than with the pies. What follows fills in what the original assumes you already know.
- Read it as a pie, not a stirred custardDespite the name, the final line — "bake in pastry" — tells you this is a single-crust apple custard pie. Line a 9-inch pan with pastry, fill, and bake.
- "2 cups apples"Genuinely ambiguous: it most likely means two cups of prepared apple, on the order of half a pound of peeled, cored fruit, which sieves down to appreciably less than that in purée. Use a tart cooking apple that breaks down readily.
- Order of workStew and sieve the apples, beat in the sugar, butter and salt while the purée is still hot so the butter melts, then let it cool to warm before adding the yolks. Yolks stirred into boiling purée will scramble and the filling will be grainy.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A custard pie of this type wants a hot start to set the pastry — 425F for about 15 minutes — then 325 to 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the centre is set but still trembles slightly.
- The meringueThree tablespoons of sugar to three whites is a soft meringue, not a hard one. Spread it on the baked, still-warm filling, take it right to the pastry edge to stop it shrinking, and return the pie to a 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes until browned.
- Seasoning quantitiesNutmeg and cinnamon are unmeasured. Around a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon and an eighth of a teaspoon of grated nutmeg suits this amount of fruit; more nutmeg than that will dominate the eggs.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Refrigerate leftovers — it is an egg custard.
Mrs. Wilson's cook book (1920) grew out of Mary A. Wilson's long-running household column in a Philadelphia newspaper, and the terseness here is a newspaper habit: ingredients stacked in a list, method reduced to a few imperatives, on the assumption that a reader who has cooked before can supply the rest. The duplicated seasoning line and the placement of an apple pie in the vegetable chapter suggest the book was assembled quickly from clipped columns rather than rewritten. The dish itself belongs to a large Anglo-American family of custard pies — pumpkin, squash, sweet potato, apple — in which a sieved purée is bound with eggs and baked in a single crust, with the leftover whites turned into meringue so nothing is wasted. That thrift was a live concern in 1920, when Wilson was still writing in the shadow of wartime food conservation campaigns.