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Boston Cream Pie
2 eggs 1 cup flour 1 1/2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 3/4 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup boiling milk 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract or other flavoring Beat yolks and whites separately; add beaten egg yolks to stiffly beaten whites and gradually add flour, baking powder, sugar and salt which have been sifted together three or four times; add hot milk very slowly; add vanilla. Bake in deep layer cake tin in moderate oven about 35 minutes. When cool, split and put between layers the following cream filling. Sprinkle powdered sugar on top of cake.
This is a hot-milk sponge, not a butter cake, and the whole thing stands or falls on how much air survives the mixing. The filling is not printed on this page, so plan on a pastry cream of your own.
- The hinge: add the milk slowlyHalf a cup of boiling milk poured in fast will deflate the eggs and set the flour into lumps. Pour it down the side of the bowl in a thin stream while folding, and stop as soon as the batter is uniform.
- Fold, do not beat"Gradually add flour... baking powder, sugar and salt" means folding the dry ingredients into the egg foam with a spatula. There is no butter, so much of the lift comes from the whipped whites, with the teaspoon and a half of baking powder assisting.
- Moderate ovenReckon 350F; "moderate" in period usage covers roughly 350 to 375F. Start checking at 25 minutes, since the cake may be done before the stated 35.
- "Deep layer cake tin"One round tin about 8 to 9 inches across and at least 2 inches deep, greased and floured. The cake is baked as a single layer and split horizontally after cooling, not baked in two pans.
- Sifting three or four timesRepeated sifting helped distribute baking powder, which clumped, through the flour. Modern flour and powder need one sifting together, though repeated sifting costs nothing.
- The missing fillingThe original refers to "the following cream filling," printed immediately after this recipe but not on this page. Any standard pastry cream works: about 2 cups milk, 1/2 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons cornstarch, 2 or 3 egg yolks, vanilla, cooked until thick and chilled fully before it goes between the layers.
- Splitting the cakeCool completely, then split with a long serrated knife. A warm sponge tears, and a warm cake melts the filling into the crumb.
- Yield and keepingOne cake, 8 slices. Once filled it must be refrigerated and is best the same day; the sponge stales quickly and the custard softens it further.
Despite the name it is a cake, not a pie. The usual explanation is that early American kitchens baked cake batter in the shallow tins they already owned, and that "pie" could mean much of anything baked in one -- though this is a widely repeated account rather than a documented one. The dish is generally traced to Boston hotel and bakery cooking of the mid-1800s, where a split sponge with custard between the layers was a standing dessert; the chocolate-glazed version most people picture today became the fixed form later, and early versions such as this one were finished with nothing but a dusting of powdered sugar. Its appearance in a Royal Baking Powder pamphlet is straightforward advertising -- the company published such collections to show householders what its product could do.