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Pineapple Custard
2 eggs. 1 cup sugar. 1 cup water. 2 tablespoons cornstarch. Butter size of an egg. Half of a small can of grated pineapple.
Put on water, sugar, butter and cornstarch; when thick, add yolks well beaten; when this is thick stir in pineapple. Have crust already baked. Can use same for lemon custard except use rind and juice of one lemon.
This is a pie filling, not a baked custard, despite the name and the odd placement in a vegetable chapter. The whole thing is a cornstarch cream cooked on the stove and poured into a blind-baked shell.
- The hinge: cook the starch outThe water, sugar, butter and cornstarch must come to a full boil and bubble for a minute or two before the yolks go in. Cornstarch does not reach full thickening power until it boils, and a filling pulled off early tastes chalky and slumps when cut.
- Temper the yolks"Add yolks well beaten" means whisk a ladle of the hot starch mixture into them first, then return the lot to the pan over low heat. Dropping cold yolks straight into boiling starch gives you sweet scrambled egg.
- Butter size of an eggUsually taken as roughly 2 ounces, or about 4 tablespoons.
- Half of a small canPeriod 'small' cans of grated pineapple varied in size, but half of one is on the order of half a cup, juice included. Canned is what the recipe wants; fresh pineapple's enzymes will not trouble cornstarch, but it is more acidic and the extra juice will loosen the filling.
- Add the fruit off the heatStir the pineapple in at the end and do not boil it hard afterward. Prolonged boiling with acidic fruit breaks down cornstarch and the set goes soft.
- The whitesThe recipe calls for two eggs but uses only the yolks, and says nothing about what becomes of the whites; a meringue is the obvious use, though the recipe does not call for one and gives no oven instruction of any kind.
- The crust"Already baked" means a pre-baked single shell, presumably 8 or 9 inches. Fill it while the custard is still hot so it sets flat, then chill several hours before cutting.
- YieldRoughly enough for one 8- or 9-inch pie.
- The lemon variationRind and juice of one lemon replaces the pineapple, but the juice arrives with the yolks or after; a whole lemon's juice added at the start will thin the starch as it cooks.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and had worked with the U.S. Food Administration during the First World War, and her books carry that period's habits: cheap thickeners, small quantities of butter and eggs, and heavy use of canned goods. Canned grated pineapple was one of the great convenience items of the 1910s and 1920s, as Hawaiian canneries scaled up and put a tropical fruit within easier reach of an ordinary East Coast kitchen. Cornstarch cream pies of exactly this construction, sugar and water bound with starch and enriched with a couple of yolks, filled American cookbooks in this period because they were far cheaper than a true baked custard of milk and whole eggs. Its filing under "Vegetables" here may simply be an error of arrangement; nothing in the recipe belongs to that chapter.