Butter Pie
1 quart of milk or cream. 8 ounces of fresh butter. 1 pound of white sugar. 4 ounces of flour.
Boil the milk with the butter in it. Mix the flour and sugar together dry, stir them into the boiling milk and take the mixture from the fire as soon as it begins to thicken. Bake like a custard in a crust.
An eggless custard pie, thickened with flour and set in the oven — closer to a sugar cream pie than to a true baked custard. Two details govern whether it works: how you introduce the flour, and how much sugar you are willing to keep.
- The hinge: dry-mix the flour and sugarThe sugar is doing the work of a dispersant, keeping the flour grains apart so they hydrate without clumping when they hit boiling milk. Combine them thoroughly while dry, add in a slow stream, and whisk constantly; flour tipped into hot milk on its own will lump instantly and no amount of beating afterwards will smooth it.
- Sugar quantityOne pound of sugar to one quart of milk is around 2 1/4 cups, and it reads as cloying to most modern palates. Halving it to a cup gives a filling much nearer contemporary sugar cream pie. Reducing it does thin the mixture slightly, so expect a softer set.
- "Bake like a custard"The recipe gives no temperature or time. By analogy with baked custard pies, a moderate oven (roughly 325-350F) until the centre is just barely mobile would suit; on a filled 9-inch shell expect somewhere around 35 to 45 minutes. Higher heat will blister and weep the surface. There is no egg here to curdle, but overbaking still dries and cracks the top.
- Blind-bake the crustThe filling goes in hot and already thickened, so a raw shell gets no chance to set before the liquid soaks it. Bake the crust to a pale gold first, then fill.
- Take it off the heat early"As soon as it begins to thicken" is deliberate. Flour continues to gelatinise off the fire and again in the oven; cook it to a full pudding consistency on the stove and the baked filling turns pasty and dull rather than silky.
- Milk or creamWhole milk gives a lighter, more custard-like slice; heavy cream gives the rich, almost fudgy texture the name implies. Half-and-half is a reasonable middle. Eight ounces of butter on top of cream is a great deal of fat — the filling will firm considerably as it chills.
- YieldA quart of liquid plus a pound of sugar makes well over a litre of filling: enough for about two 9-inch pies, or three shallow ones. Halve the recipe for a single pie.
- ServingCool completely before cutting. Warm, the filling slumps; fully chilled, it slices cleanly and the butter flavour comes forward.
Eggless custard pies like this one belong to a broad American family — sugar cream, butter, "finger" and desperation pies — filled with what a kitchen always had on hand when eggs were scarce or expensive, and thickened with flour or cornstarch instead. The type is most strongly associated with Indiana and with Quaker and Pennsylvania German households, where sugar cream pie is still a regional fixture, though similar fillings turn up across the Midwest and Upper South. The quart-scale quantities and the terse final line — "bake like a custard in a crust" — assume a reader who already knew what a custard pie should look like coming out of the oven and needed no further telling.