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Cream Filling
2½ cups milk 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 eggs, well beaten Mix sugar, flour and eggs, and stir into hot milk. Cook in top of a double boiler 10 minutes. Add vanilla.
This is a plain pastry cream, the standard filling for cream pies, layer cakes and cream puffs in American recipe books of the period. The transcription has lost the quantities for two of its ingredients, so read the notes before starting.
- Missing amountsThe method calls for sugar and flour, but the ingredient list as printed gives neither quantity. Comparable fillings often use somewhere in the region of half to three-quarters of a cup of sugar and a third to a half cup of flour to 2 1/2 cups of milk; the original does not say, so treat any figure as a reconstruction rather than the book's intent.
- Flour, not cornstarchA flour-thickened filling needs the full cooking time to lose its raw, pasty taste, and it sets softer and cloudier than a cornstarch one. If you substitute cornstarch, use about half as much by volume and stop cooking as soon as it thickens and turns glossy.
- Temper the eggs"Stir into hot milk" invites scrambling. Whisk a ladleful of the hot milk into the sugar-flour-egg mixture first, then return everything to the pan, whisking constantly.
- Double boiler timingTen minutes over simmering water is a minimum, not a maximum. Cook until the custard coats a spoon thickly and no floury taste remains, stirring the whole time and scraping the corners of the upper pan.
- Vanilla lastThe recipe adds it after cooking. Vanilla's aromatics are volatile, so adding it off the heat preserves them; the same applies to any liqueur or extract used instead.
- Cooling and storagePress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface to stop a skin forming, and chill promptly. It is an egg-and-milk custard: refrigerate it and use within two or three days.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 to 3 cups once thickened, enough to fill one 9-inch pie shell, a two-layer cake, or a dozen cream puffs.
Cream filling of this kind is the domesticated descendant of French crème pâtissière, which reached American kitchens through nineteenth-century pastry manuals and then settled into community and church cookbooks as an all-purpose filling for whatever needed one. The style is exactly this: an ingredient list, four terse sentences, and the assumption that the reader already knows what a double boiler is for and how thick a custard should be. The double boiler itself is the period detail worth noticing. Before thermostatic ranges, a pan set over simmering water was a dependable way to moderate the heat under an egg custard and reduce the risk of curdling, which is why so many recipes of this era specify it.