Custard Pie
2 eggs 3 tablespoons sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt 1½ cups milk Few gratings nutmeg Beat eggs slightly, add sugar, salt, and milk. Line plate with paste, and build up a fluted rim. Strain in the mixture and sprinkle with few gratings 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.
Fannie Farmer's custard pie is a two-temperature bake, and the recipe says why: the crust wants heat, the custard does not. Everything else follows from managing that conflict.
- The hinge: two oven temperaturesThe hinge: two oven temperatures. The book names none — a 'quick oven' in Farmer's usage is roughly 400-450F, and the lower second stage is left to the cook's judgment. Modern practice is to start hot for 10-15 minutes to set the pastry rim, then drop to around 325-350F to finish. Custard held much above about 180-185F is liable to curdle and weep, separating into sweet water and rubbery curd.
- "Plate" and "paste"A pie plate, not a dinner plate; "paste" is simply pie pastry. The filling is modest — 1½ cups milk and 2 eggs — and will sit shallow in a larger plate, so scale up if yours is on the big side.
- DonenessPull the pie when the outer two inches are set but a circle in the middle still shakes as a unit, like loose gelatin. Carryover heat finishes it. A knife inserted at the edge should come out clean; testing the center is what makes people overbake.
- The soggy bottomThe book relies on the initial blast of heat alone. Modern practice is to partly blind-bake the shell, cool it slightly, and pour in the warm custard — or set the pie plate on a preheated baking sheet or stone in the lower third of the oven.
- StrainingNot optional decoration. It catches chalazae and any stringy albumen, which otherwise show as tough white threads in the finished slice.
- MilkWhole milk. Modern skim or low-fat will set thinly and taste watery here, since there is no cream and only three tablespoons of sugar to carry the flavor.
- NutmegGrate it over the surface after the filling is in the shell, as directed — mixed into the custard it settles out and the top goes drab.
- YieldSix modest wedges. Serve at room temperature or chilled; refrigerate leftovers, as this is an egg-and-milk custard.
Custard pie is one of the oldest surviving English-American pastry forms — a sweetened egg-and-milk filling baked in a crust, descended from the medieval "crustade," where the pastry is often said to have begun life as a container rather than something to eat, though medieval crusts were frequently eaten. By the time Fannie Farmer put this in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, it called for four cheap ingredients, no fruit, and no particular season. What makes the entry characteristic of Farmer is the last clause, where she stops giving orders and explains the chemistry — egg and milk in combination need a low temperature. That habit of telling the cook why, alongside her insistence on level standardized measurements, is the reason the book reshaped American home cooking rather than simply joining the shelf of receipt collections that preceded it.