Chess Cakes
5 eggs. 2 cups sugar. 1/2 cup butter. 1 cup milk. 1 tablespoon each flour and meal.
Beat yolks light with sugar, mix flour and meal with dry sugar, add soft butter, and mix all with milk, make stiff meringue with five whites and five tablespoons sugar. This makes three pies.
A chess filling in the old style: eggs, sugar, butter and milk with barely a spoonful of starch to hold it. The instructions assume you know it goes into pastry and that the meringue goes on top.
- Meal means cornmeal"Meal" here is fine yellow or white cornmeal, the traditional chess-pie thickener alongside the flour. It sets the custard and gives the filling its faint gritty texture, which is the point rather than a fault.
- You need pastryThe recipe never mentions shells because a cook of the period would not have needed telling. Three plain short-crust shells, partly blind-baked, keep the bottoms from going sodden under a wet custard.
- The thickener is oddly scantOne tablespoon each of flour and meal across three pies is very little, and it is unclear whether Mrs. Wilson meant a tablespoon per pie. Read as written, the filling relies almost entirely on the five yolks to set.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, about 350F, is the usual modern equivalent for a custard filling of this kind; higher and the egg curdles and weeps. The filling is done when the centre still trembles slightly.
- The meringue is leanFive whites to five tablespoons of sugar is roughly half the sugar a modern soft meringue carries, so it will be soft and quick to weep. Spread it so it touches the crust all round, and bake until set and lightly coloured, about 12 to 15 minutes in a moderate oven.
- Divide the yolks and whites firstThe whole recipe hangs on separating cleanly at the start: five yolks go into the filling, all five whites into the meringue. Any yolk in the whites and the meringue will not come up stiff.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar and one cup of milk make a shallow filling. It stretches to three pies only in small tins, or in individual tart shells, which may be what "cakes" implies here.
- Filed oddlyThis appears among the vegetable recipes. It is a dessert pie and sits nowhere near the rest of that chapter.
Chess pie is a Southern American fixture, a sugar-and-egg custard stiffened with a spoonful of cornmeal, and it is usually connected to the older English family of sweetmeat and curd tarts. The name has never been settled: it is variously traced to "cheese" (as in lemon cheese or curd tart, though no cheese is present), to the pie chest or safe such pies kept well in, and to plain dialect contraction -- all of these are traditional explanations rather than established ones. Its appeal in a household book of this period is that it leans on pantry staples: sugar, flour and meal, with eggs, butter and milk the only perishables. The meringue lid, using the whites left over from a yolk-rich filling, is the same economy at work: nothing in the egg is wasted.