Home › Pastries › Custard for Pies
Custard for Pies
3 egg yolks. 2-3 cup sugar. 1 full tablespoon cornstarch. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 2 cups milk. 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Heat milk, beat yolks very light, add sugar and cornstarch, beat again, mix with a little hot milk and add to rest of milk. Cook until thick, stirring all the time. Line pan with pastry and bake crust until set. Pour in custard and bake brown. For cocoanut, add one cup grated cocoa- Sliced bananas may be used in this custard, making delicious banana pie. Chocolate custard made also by adding one-fourth pound Baker's chocolate and two tablespoons butter.
This is a stovetop pastry cream poured into a par-baked shell and given a short browning in the oven — closer to a modern cream pie than to the shivery baked custard pie of the same era. A few of the printed measurements have suffered in transcription.
- The sugar measure"2-3 cup sugar" is almost certainly 2/3 cup, a common typesetting loss of the fraction bar. Two to three cups would be inedible in two cups of milk; 2/3 cup is right for this quantity.
- The truncated line"one cup grated cocoa-" breaks off mid-word and means grated cocoanut, that is, one cup shredded coconut. The recipe does not say at what point to add it; stirring it into the finished custard before it goes into the shell is the obvious reading.
- The hinge: temper, then do not stop stirringWhisk a little hot milk into the yolk-sugar-cornstarch mixture before returning it to the pan, and stir constantly over medium heat. Cornstarch custard needs to reach a bare boil for the starch to thicken and to kill the yolk enzyme that would otherwise thin it again on standing, but left unstirred it scorches on the bottom in seconds.
- Blind baking"Bake crust until set" means a par-bake. The recipe gives no temperature or time; in a modern oven, line the pastry with parchment and weights, bake at 400F for about 15 minutes, then remove the weights and give it 5 minutes more until dry and pale gold.
- "Bake brown"The filling is already cooked, so this is only colour. The recipe gives no temperature; a short spell in a moderate oven, say ten to fifteen minutes around 350F, is enough, and a long bake risks the custard weeping.
- Chocolate versionA quarter pound is 4 oz. Baker's sold unsweetened baking chocolate, which is what is meant here, though the firm also carried sweetened bars. Melt it with the butter into the hot custard, and expect to add another 1/4 cup sugar, since 4 oz of unsweetened chocolate in two cups of milk is very bitter at the base sugar level.
- Banana versionLayer the sliced bananas into the baked shell and pour the hot custard over them rather than baking them in for long; browned banana slices turn grey and slippery. Better still, chill this version rather than browning it.
- YieldAbout one 9-inch pie, eight slices; the recipe names no pan size. Cool at least three hours before cutting or the cornstarch set will not hold; refrigerate leftovers.
This custard shows the thrift of its moment. Cornstarch, cheap and shelf-stable, spread rapidly through American dessert cookery in the second half of the nineteenth century and let a cook stretch both eggs and cream. The single base with three variations printed as an afterthought is characteristic of the period's economy of print, and of a house style that treated coconut, banana and chocolate as interchangeable finishing touches on one reliable formula.