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Corn Starch Custard Pie or Arrowroot Pudding
1 quart of milk. 2 ounces of starch. 8 ounces of sugar. 2 ounces of butter. 6 eggs Lemon or vanilla flavoring.
Mix the starch with a little of the milk cold. Boil the rest of the milk with the sugar in it, stir in the starch, then the butter and eggs, and take it from the fire immediately. Bake in crusts.
A bakeshop formula: a stovetop pastry cream poured into shells and set in the oven, which gives a custard pie that slices cleanly instead of weeping. The weights are professional, so scale them into cups carefully.
- The hinge: temper the eggsSix eggs stirred straight into near-boiling starched milk can curdle. Beat them first, whisk a ladle or two of the hot mixture into them, then return that to the pan. The recipe itself adds the eggs in the pan and says only to "take it from the fire immediately"; tempering is a modern safeguard on that instruction, not a reading of it.
- Weights to volume2 oz cornstarch is about 1/2 cup, 8 oz sugar a generous 1 cup, 2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons. A quart of milk is 4 cups. Use six eggs as written.
- "Starch" means cornstarch or arrowrootThe title offers both. They behave differently: arrowroot thickens fast, is less happy in milk, and breaks down if held over heat, so the set may be softer and the texture slicker. Flour would need a heavier weight to do the same work.
- Mix cold, alwaysSlaking the starch in a little cold milk before it meets the hot is not optional. Dumped dry into boiling milk it will lump instantly and no amount of beating recovers it.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven heat or time, only "Bake in crusts". A moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 30 to 40 minutes suits a filling that is already cooked: bake until set at the edge with a slight wobble at the centre. It carries on firming as it cools.
- Crusts"Bake in crusts" assumes raw shells that will finish in the same bake, but a hot wet filling in raw pastry is the usual cause of a soggy bottom. Partially blind-baking the shells first is the safer route.
- FlavoringAdd the lemon zest or vanilla after the pan leaves the heat, so it is not driven off. Lemon here means grated rind or a spirit-based extract, not juice, which will thin the starch bond.
- YieldThe quart of milk fills two 9-inch pies generously, or one deep pie plus a dish of pudding baked on its own.
Cornstarch was an industrial novelty turned pantry staple in the nineteenth century, its commercial manufacture generally traced to the Oswego starch works in New York in the 1840s, and by the time American pastry manuals like this one were written it was widely available to bakers. Arrowroot, imported from the West Indies and considerably dearer, did the same job with a finer texture and was the older, more genteel choice. A pure egg custard is fragile and weeps, while a starch-bound custard sets firmly enough to be cut and served in neat slices. The butter may well be there for gloss and mouthfeel rather than structure.