Date Pie
2 cups milk 2 eggs 1/3 pound sugar dates ¾ teaspoon salt Few gratings nutmeg Cook dates with milk twenty minutes in top of double boiler. Strain, and rub through sieve, then add eggs and salt. Bake same as Custard Pie.
Lemon Pie I 1/2 cup chopped apple 1 cup sugar 1 beaten egg 1/4 cup rolled common crackers 2 tablespoons lemon juice Grated rind 1 lemon 1 teaspoon melted butter Mix ingredients in order given and bake with two crusts. 3/4 cup sugar ¼ cup boiling water
A date custard pie: the dates are cooked into the milk, sieved, and the puree stands in for the sugar. The transcription here has run into the Lemon Pie that follows it, so read the ingredient list with care.
- Where the text runs togetherEverything from "Lemon Pie" onward belongs to a following recipe, and the trailing "3/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup boiling water" is stray text from a later one again (it does not fit the Lemon Pie ingredient list printed above it). The date pie needs only milk, dates, eggs, salt and nutmeg.
- "1/3 pound sugar dates"The word "sugar" sits oddly here and is most likely stray text (note the loose "3/4 cup sugar" at the end of the page); read the line as "1/3 pound dates." On that reading the pie takes no added sugar and the dates supply the sweetness. "14 teaspoon salt" is 1/4 teaspoon.
- 1/3 pound of datesAbout 1 cup of pitted dates, roughly 20 Deglet Noor or 6 to 7 large Medjool. Pit them before cooking; the sieve will catch skins but pits will simply block it.
- The sieving is the hingeTwenty minutes in the double boiler softens the dates but does not dissolve them. Push the whole mixture through a fine sieve with a wooden spoon or use a food mill — a blender leaves flecks of skin that give the finished custard a fibrous texture.
- Cool before adding eggsThe milk comes off the heat near 180F. Let it drop to warm, or whisk a little into the beaten eggs first, or you will have sweet date scrambled eggs rather than a custard.
- "Bake same as Custard Pie"One bottom crust only. The book gives no temperatures; in a modern oven, starting hot for about 10 minutes to set the pastry and then dropping to a moderate 325-350F for 30 to 40 minutes works. It is done when the edge is set and the centre still trembles; a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean. Carryover heat finishes the middle.
- Soggy bottomA wet custard on raw pastry is the classic problem. Blind-bake the shell 10 minutes and brush it with a little beaten egg white before filling.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six modest slices. Serve at room temperature or cold; it slices badly while hot.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) carries a long run of custard-family pies, and this is among the thriftiest of them, with the sweetness supplied largely by dried fruit. Dates reached American groceries in quantity through the late nineteenth century as pressed blocks and boxed slabs imported from North Africa and the Persian Gulf — cheap, shelf-stable, and sweet enough to substitute for sugar. The technique of cooking fruit into milk and sieving it belongs to the older tradition of pumpkin and squash pies, where a vegetable or fruit puree thickened with egg stands in for a plain baked custard. That Farmer describes the baking only by cross-reference — "same as Custard Pie" — is characteristic of the book.