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Custard Pie
Six eggs, one and one-half cupfuls of sugar, one cupful of butter, six tablespoonfuls of corn starch or flour and three cups of milk; flavor to taste.
This is sufficient for three pies; bake with one crust only.
A late-Victorian custard pie of the rich, buttery sort — closer to what the South calls a chess pie than to the plain milk-and-egg custard. The original assumes you know how to fill and bake a single-crust pie, so most of the work here is supplying the numbers it leaves out.
- Scale it downThe quantities are given as enough for three pies; the original does not state a size, so assume roughly 8- to 9-inch shells. For one pie, use 2 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/3 cup butter, 2 tablespoons cornstarch or flour, and 1 cup milk.
- That much butter is deliberateA full cup of butter to three pies is roughly 5 tablespoons per pie, which is why this sets like a chess pie rather than a trembling custard. Cream the softened butter with the sugar first, then beat in the eggs, then the starch, then the milk — adding cold milk to melted butter will simply separate.
- Cornstarch or flour is not a straight swapSix tablespoons of cornstarch will set noticeably firmer than six of flour, which gives a softer filling. Either works.
- No oven temperature is givenBake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 325-350F for another 30-40 minutes. A slow finish is what keeps the eggs from curdling into a weeping, pitted filling.
- DonenessPull the pie when the outer two inches are set and the centre still wobbles as a single mass, not in ripples. It firms as it cools. A knife inserted in the middle coming out clean means it has already gone slightly too far.
- Par-bake the shell"Bake with one crust only" means a single bottom crust and no lid. A wet custard filling in a raw shell is the standard cause of a sodden base, so blind-bake the pastry for 10-12 minutes before filling.
- "Flavor to taste"Nutmeg is the flavouring most often paired with custard pie in period cookbooks; vanilla or lemon extract, about a teaspoon, also appear. Nutmeg is usually grated over the surface after the filling is poured.
- YieldThree pies, 6 to 8 slices each. Refrigerate once cool; an egg-and-dairy filling should not sit out more than a couple of hours.
Custard pie is one of the oldest continuously made English-language pies — a medieval "crustade" was a pastry coffin filled with a set egg mixture, the word naming the crusted tart itself. By the nineteenth century the plain version, eggs and milk and sugar and nutmeg, had become the archetypal cheap family pie in America, which is exactly why a recipe of this kind is printed without an oven temperature or a baking time: the assumption is that everyone has watched one made. What sets this particular version apart is the butter and the starch, which push it toward a richer transitional style often compared to chess pie, generally traced to Southern kitchens where the aim was a filling that would slice cleanly and keep a day or two. The instruction to make three pies at once is a fair picture of period baking, where a hot oven was worth filling.