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Custard Pie. Ordinary
8 eggs. 1 quart of milk. 6 or 8 ounces of sugar. Nutmeg, lemon or vanilla flavoring.
Beat the eggs and sugar together, add the milk gradually, flavor, and bake in deep paste-lined pie pans with high edges. The thicker the custard the better the pie.
A plain baked custard in a crust, given in the terse professional shorthand of a bakeshop manual — no oven temperature, no time, no yield. The ratio is sound; everything else has to be supplied.
- YieldA quart of milk with eight eggs and the sugar makes something like six cups of custard — enough for two deep 9-inch pies, or three shallow ones. The book assumes a shop turning out pies by the batch.
- Sugar by weight6 to 8 ounces is roughly 1 to 1 1/8 cups granulated (a cup weighs about 7 ounces). The lower figure gives a custard that tastes of egg and nutmeg; the higher is closer to a modern dessert pie.
- "Paste" means pastryA plain short paste, rolled thin and fitted into the pan with a high fluted edge to hold the liquid. Deep pans matter here, since the filling is poured in nearly to the rim.
- The soggy bottomWet custard on raw pastry is the perennial problem. Partly bake the shell first, then brush the hot base with beaten egg white to seal it before filling.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Custard sets at around 175 to 180F and curdles as it goes further above that, so bake moderate — around 325 to 350F — rather than in the hot oven a fruit pie wants. Too much heat makes the filling weep and pull away from the crust.
- Judging donenessTake the pie out while the centre still trembles as a whole; carryover heat finishes it. A knife-in-the-centre test cuts the set and starts a crack. An instant-read thermometer at the centre should show about 175F.
- Strain and skimPass the mixture through a sieve after mixing to catch chalazae and any stringy white, and skim the foam off the surface before it goes into the shell. Foam bakes into a pocked, freckled top.
- FlavouringNutmeg is best grated over the surface after the custard is in the pan rather than beaten in — it floats and speckles. Vanilla here would most likely have been a bottled extract; a teaspoon or two suits the full quart.
- "The thicker the custard the better"This most likely means depth of filling rather than consistency, though the line will bear either reading. A deep pie holds heat longer, so give a very deep one extra time at the same moderate temperature rather than turning the oven up.
Custard pie belongs to the oldest layer of English pastry — a sweetened egg-and-milk filling baked in a "coffin" of paste, recorded in medieval cookery as doucet or crustade, the latter generally taken as the source of the word custard itself. By the time this trade manual appeared, it had become bakeshop bread and butter: cheap, fast to assemble, and made from ingredients any shop already had on hand for other work. The heading "Ordinary" reads less as a judgement than as a likely trade distinction, separating the everyday version from richer ones built on cream, extra yolks or a boiled base. The confidence of the instruction — a bare ratio, no temperature, no time — tells you who the book was written for: someone who already knew what his own oven did.