Custard Pie
3 tablespoons sugar. 1/8 teaspoon salt. 1½ cups milk 2 eggs Few gratings nutmeg Beat eggs slightly, add sugar, salt and milk. Line plate with paste No. 1 and build up a fluted rim. Strain in mixture, and sprinkle with few gratings of nutmeg. Bake in quick oven at first to set rim, decrease the heat afterwards, as egg and milk in combination need to be cooked at low temperature.
A plain baked custard pie in a single crust. The instruction that governs everything is the two-stage bake, and the printed ingredient list is incomplete.
- Missing quantitiesSugar and salt appear in the method but not in the list, so the original gives no amounts. For 1½ cups milk and 2 eggs, custard recipes of this period generally run to about ¼ cup sugar and a pinch of salt, but that is a reconstruction rather than what the book says.
- The two-stage bakeThe book gives no temperatures or times. "Quick oven" in books of this period is generally taken to mean somewhere in the region of 425-450F, held only long enough to set the pastry rim, after which the heat is dropped to a moderate-to-slow oven for the remainder, as the recipe itself explains. Baked hot throughout, the custard curdles and weeps.
- Knowing when it is doneThe filling should still wobble at the centre when the pie comes out; it firms as it cools. A knife inserted halfway between rim and centre comes out clean. Carryover heat finishes the middle.
- Paste No. 1A cross-reference to the book's first pastry recipe, presumably its plain pie crust; the text reproduced here does not say what goes into it. Any single unsweetened shortcrust will do. The original does not ask for the shell to be baked blind before filling.
- "Line plate"Plate means pie plate, a shallow tin; the book gives no diameter, and the quantity of filling is small. The fluted rim is structural as much as decorative here: it holds a thin filling that is poured in raw.
- StrainingNot optional. Straining catches chalazae and any set egg, which is the difference between a smooth custard and one that bakes with threads through it.
- MilkWhole milk. The custard is already lean at two eggs to 1½ cups; skim or low-fat milk will set thin and watery.
- YieldOne pie; the book states neither a tin size nor a number of servings. Cool completely before cutting, and refrigerate any that is kept.
Custard pie is one of the oldest sweet pies in the English tradition, descended from the medieval "crustade" — a pastry coffin filled with a set egg-and-milk mixture, sometimes savoury with meat, later sweetened. By the time American household books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were printed, it had settled into exactly this form: two eggs, a little sugar, milk, nutmeg, one crust. Its presence in a collection called Reliable Recipes is telling. The pie needs nothing that is not in an ordinary kitchen, and the whole difficulty lies in oven control, which is why the instruction spends more words on heat than on ingredients. Nutmeg on baked custard is often said to be a very old pairing in English cookery, though here, as in many such books, it is still spelled out in the recipe.