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Cream Filling (Cup milk tablespoons corn)
1 cup milk 2 tablespoons corn starch 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons sugar 1 egg 1 teaspoon flavoring Put milk on to scald. Mix corn starch, salt and sugar with a little cold milk; add to well beaten egg; then add to hot milk. Cook about three minutes or until thick and smooth; add flavoring, and spread between layers.
A basic cornstarch pastry cream, thin by modern standards but exactly what a two-layer cake of the period called for. It comes together in about ten minutes and needs watching only at the end.
- Scalding the milkBring the milk just to the point where bubbles form at the edge and steam rises, around 180F. It need not boil, and boiling it hard in a thin pan will scorch the bottom.
- Temper the eggThe instruction to add the cold starch slurry to the beaten egg first, then that mixture to the hot milk, is the safeguard against scrambling. Pour in a thin stream while whisking, and return everything to the pan off the heat before setting it back on a low flame.
- Three minutes means after it thickensCornstarch begins to thicken well below boiling, but it tastes raw and chalky until the mixture has come close to a boil and bubbled for a minute or two. Cook it until the surface blips slowly and the whisk leaves a track, then keep going a further minute or so.
- Cornstarch, not flour"Corn starch" here is the pure starch sold as cornflour in Britain, not cornmeal and not wheat flour. Two tablespoons to a cup of milk gives a soft filling that will spread but not hold a piped shape.
- FlavoringThe unspecified teaspoon most likely means vanilla extract, with lemon extract and almond the other common choices of the period. Add it off the heat, since the volatile oils dissipate with cooking.
- Cool it coveredPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface while it cools, or you will get a skin that streaks the filling. Chill fully before spreading, as warm filling will slide out from between the layers.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to fill a single layer of an eight- or nine-inch cake. Double it for a three-layer cake.
- KeepingAn egg-and-milk filling of this kind belongs in the refrigerator and is best eaten the same day. It does not freeze; the starch weeps on thawing.
Cream fillings built on cornstarch were the American home-kitchen answer to French crème pâtissière, which leans on egg yolks and flour and generally takes a longer cooking. Cornstarch had been manufactured in the United States since the middle of the nineteenth century and was cheap, shelf-stable and reliable in a way that a yolk-thickened custard was not for a cook working over a wood or coal range with no thermometer. A filling of this kind is telling: layer cakes are often said to have become the standard American celebration cake by 1900, and a filling that could be made from a cup of milk and one egg put them within reach of any household. The single whole egg, rather than three or four yolks, is the economy that marks the recipe as domestic rather than professional.