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Brown Sugar Custard
3 cups brown sugar. 3 eggs. 1/2 cup butter. Bake in good pastry.
Four lines and no oven, no time, no pan size — this is shorthand for a cook who already knew what a sugar pie looked like. The gaps are worth naming before you start.
- It is a pie, not a spooned custard"Bake in good pastry" means the mixture is baked in a pastry shell, presumably unbaked, and sets in the oven. There is no milk and no water in the ingredient list, so this is a dense sugar filling closer to the chess-pie family than to a true custard.
- The sugar quantity is out of proportionThe sugar quantity is heavy -- Three cups of brown sugar to three eggs and half a cup of butter makes a lot of filling, enough for two 9-inch shells, and it bakes very sweet and very firm. Treat the three cups as a bulk figure and scale down if you want a single pie.
- Brown sugar then and nowBrown sugar of the period was probably moister and less uniform than today's packed light brown. Measure it packed, and break up any lumps with the butter before the eggs go in.
- Butter temperatureHalf a cup of butter should be soft, not melted, and creamed with the sugar first. Melted butter separates out and floats to the top of the filling as an oily layer during baking.
- OvenNothing is given. Standard practice for an unbaked pastry shell with a wet filling is a hot start at 425F for the first 10 to 12 minutes to set the crust, then down to 325-350F for 30 to 40 minutes more.
- Knowing when it is doneThe edge will puff and the centre should still wobble slightly when you take it out; it firms as it cools. Baked until the middle is solid, a filling this sugar-heavy turns to candy and weeps syrup when cut.
Mrs. Wilson's book collects the columns she wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal in Philadelphia around the end of the First World War, when sugar, butter and eggs were all in short supply and cooks were widely encouraged to substitute. Pies of this kind — brown sugar, eggs, butter and a shell, with no milk and no fruit — belong to a long line of thrift desserts known variously as sugar pie, sugar cream pie, chess pie and, in French Canada, tarte au sucre. They exist because the ingredients keep: a cook with a barrel of brown sugar and a few eggs could put a dessert on the table in midwinter without fruit or cream. The extreme brevity of the instructions is itself characteristic of the period, since the reader was assumed to know her own stove better than any printed temperature could tell her.