Crum Pie
Three eggs, whites separated; 1½ cup sugar; beat whites of eggs into yolk; 1/2 cup water (cold), 2 cups flour, 2 full tsp. Royal baking powder. Filling: 1 egg, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 tbsp. flour, 2 cups of milk scalded, and a pinch of salt, 1 tsp. vanilla.
— Mrs. J. H. Proffit
This is a butterless water sponge baked in layers with a stirred custard filling — closer to a Boston cream pie than to a Pennsylvania crumb pie. The original assumes you know how to assemble it, so most of the work here is filling in what the contributor left out.
- The hinge: the filling is a stovetop custardWhisk the egg, sugar, flour and salt together, temper in the scalded milk in a thin stream, then cook over low heat, stirring, until it thickens and just coats the spoon. Let it boil hard and the egg curdles; add the vanilla off the heat so it does not cook away.
- That filling is deliberately thinOne tablespoon of flour for two cups of milk sets to a pourable sauce, not a sliceable pastry cream. If you want it to stay between layers rather than soak into them, three to four tablespoons of flour is the usual modern proportion — but that is a change to the recipe, not a translation of it.
- "Whites separated"The instruction is compressed. Separate the eggs, beat the yolks with the sugar and water, stir in the flour and baking powder, then beat the whites stiff and fold them in last. With no butter in the batter, the folded whites work alongside the baking powder to give the cake its lift.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given, as was usual in recipes of this kind. Bake in two greased 8- or 9-inch layer tins at 350F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the centre springs back; the thinner 9-inch layers will be at the shorter end.
- Royal baking powderRoyal was a cream-of-tartar powder, single-acting, so the reaction began as soon as the liquid went in and period cooks had to work quickly. Modern double-acting powder holds part of its lift back for the oven; two full teaspoons for two cups of flour is about one teaspoon per cup, which is the ordinary modern proportion. Get the batter into the tins promptly either way.
- Scalding the milkBring it to about 180F, when a ring of bubbles forms at the edge — not a rolling boil. Scalding is usually explained as a precaution with unpasteurised milk; today it mainly speeds the custard and keeps it smooth.
- Assembly and yieldCool the layers and the custard separately, then fill. Two layers, eight to ten servings. Because of the milk custard, keep it refrigerated and eat it within two days.
The Philathea and Baraca classes were adult Sunday-school groups — Philathea for women, Baraca for men — that spread widely through American Protestant churches in the early twentieth century. This entry takes the form of a signed contribution from Mrs. J. H. Proffit, written for someone who already bakes and needs only the proportions. The name is the puzzle. Pennsylvania "crumb pie" ordinarily means a pastry shell under a rubbed crumb topping, and this is not that; recipes of this type — a plain water sponge split and filled with boiled custard — circulated under a shifting set of names including cream pie, custard cake and Boston cream pie, since any layer cake baked in pie tins was liable to be called a pie. "Crum" is often taken as a spelling of "crumb" describing the cake's dry, tender crumb, but that reading is traditional rather than documented. What is certain is the economy of the thing: three eggs, no butter, and water in place of milk in the batter, with the milk saved for the filling.