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Mock Cream Pie
One cup sugar, four tablespoons cornstarch, yolks of three eggs, one pint of hot milk, pinch of salt, one teaspoon butter.
Beat the yolks of the eggs, add the sugar and cornstarch, well mixed. Stir in the hot milk slowly and add the salt and butter. Turn into a crust already baked. Grate nutmeg on the top. Bake till firm. Cover with meringue and brown.
A cornstarch-and-yolk custard pie of the plainest kind, written for a cook who already knew how a custard behaves. Two things in the method need translating for a modern range.
- Cook the filling firstAs written, the raw custard goes into the baked shell and sets in the oven, which is slow and tends to give a grainy or weeping filling. Standard practice now is to cook the sugar, cornstarch, yolks and hot milk together in a saucepan over medium heat until it thickens and bubbles, then hold it at a boil for a full minute so the starch reaches its full thickening power and the enzyme in the yolks is destroyed. Off the heat, stir in the salt and butter.
- Temper the yolks"Stir in the hot milk slowly" is the whole safeguard against scrambled egg. Add the hot milk to the yolk-sugar-starch mixture in a thin stream while whisking, not the reverse.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. Whole milk is what the book assumes; skim will set but tastes thin against a cup of sugar.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. For browning the meringue, 350F for 12 to 15 minutes gives an even colour; a hotter oven, 400F, browns in 6 to 8 minutes but is more likely to bead.
- The meringueThe recipe gives no quantity; the three whites left from the yolks are the obvious amount, beaten with roughly 6 tablespoons of sugar. Spread it over the filling while the filling is still hot and seal it right to the crust edge, which helps keep it from shrinking and weeping.
- NutmegGrate it over the filling before the meringue goes on, or over the meringue after browning. Whole nutmeg grated fresh is markedly different from the pre-ground jar and is what the recipe means.
- YieldThe quantities suit a shell of about 9 inches; eight modest slices. Chill several hours before cutting or the starch custard will slump.
The "mock" in the title is doing real work: a proper cream pie was made with cream, and cream was expensive, seasonal and quick to sour in a house without reliable refrigeration. Cornstarch, cheap and shelf-stable by the late nineteenth century, let a cook build the same thick pale custard from milk and egg yolks, with a teaspoon of butter standing in for the missing richness. Recipes of this kind are common in American household books of the period, often alongside other "mock" dishes such as mock turtle soup or a mock mince pie made with crackers. The meringue also puts to use the three whites the filling leaves over.