Cream Pie
Bake three crusts on separate pie plates. Put together with Cream Filling and dust over with powdered sugar. If allowed to stand after filling for any length of time, the pastry will soften.
This is an assembly instruction rather than a full recipe: three separately baked rounds of pastry stacked with pastry cream between them. Everything depends on the two components it points you to, and on timing.
- The hinge: assemble at the last minuteThe final line is the whole method. Crisp pastry and wet custard begin trading moisture on contact, and within an hour or two the layers go limp. Bake and cool the rounds ahead, chill the filling, and put the pie together no more than half an hour before it is cut.
- What "three crusts" meansThree rounds of plain pie paste, each rolled thin and baked without filling, then stacked with filling between them — a stacked pastry, not a single-shell pie. The recipe has them baked on separate pie plates; prick the dough all over first to keep it from lifting.
- Oven heatNo oven heat is given here. Thin blind-baked pastry of this kind is usually taken at a brisk heat, in the region of 425–450°F for 12–15 minutes, but this is inference rather than anything the recipe states; watch closely, since thin pastry with no filling to protect it colors fast.
- Cream FillingThe recipe points to a separate "Cream Filling" not given here; in books of this period that is typically a pastry cream of sugar, flour, egg, scalded milk and flavoring, cooked thick and cooled. Whatever the formula, it needs to be cold and set before it goes between the layers, or it will run out at the edges.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered sugar" generally meant sugar ground finer than granulated, not the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Either will dust adequately; confectioners' clings better.
- Cutting and yieldCutting -- Three stacked layers of crisp pastry shatter under a downward cut. Use a serrated knife with a sawing motion, or score the top round into wedges before assembling. No yield is given.
The entry reads like classroom shorthand — the crust and the custard have been taught already, so the "recipe" is only the instruction for putting them together. The layered pastry-and-custard form belongs to the same family as the Napoleon and the mille-feuille, both of which are older than this book; the American Boston cream pie, despite the name, is a cake. In this period the name "cream pie" tended to attach to the filling rather than the structure — anything built around a cooked milk-and-egg custard, made from the flour, milk and eggs a household already had.