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Butterscotch Pie
1½ cup milk
2 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons corn-starch
2 tablespoons powdered sugar
Heat one cup of milk and the sugar until the sugar is free from lumps. Mix the corn-starch, one-half cup milk and egg-yolks and add to the hot mixture slowly. Cook in a double boiler until thick, stirring constantly, then for ten minutes longer. Add butter. When cool, pour into a baked shell. Cover with a meringue made from the stiffly beaten egg-whites and the powdered sugar. Brown in the oven.
As an attractive variation, cover the top of the pie with halves of marshmallows and brown in the oven. In this case, one whole egg instead of two yolks may be used in the filling.
A cornstarch custard pie of the sort that filled American dessert pages in the 1910s and 20s. The ingredient list and the method disagree about the milk, which is the first thing to sort out.
- The milk discrepancyThe list gives ½ cup milk, but the method heats one cup with the sugar and then uses another half cup to slake the cornstarch. Work from the method: 1½ cups milk total. Half a cup alone will not hydrate three tablespoons of cornstarch into a sliceable filling.
- Brown sugar is the butterscotchThere is no scotch, no caramel step and no browning of the sugar here — the flavour comes entirely from the molasses in the brown sugar. Use dark brown for a pronounced butterscotch note; light brown gives a pale, mild filling. Most modern brown sugar is refined white sugar with molasses added back; the recipe's instruction to heat until the sugar is 'free from lumps' suggests the period product needed more coaxing than a free-flowing modern bag.
- Tempering the yolks"Add to the hot mixture slowly" is the whole trick: pour a ladle of the hot milk into the cornstarch-yolk slurry first, whisk, then return it all to the pan. Dumping cold yolks into hot milk scrambles them.
- The ten minutes longerNot padding. Cornstarch thickens well before it is cooked out, and raw starch tastes chalky; egg yolks also carry an enzyme (alpha-amylase) that can digest the starch and thin the filling on standing unless the custard is held hot long enough to destroy it. Ten minutes of continued cooking is the recipe's insurance, though a double boiler may sit below boiling point, so give it the full time and expect a thick, glossy custard before you stop.
- Cool before filling"When cool" means to about room temperature. Pour hot filling into a baked shell and the crust steams and softens underneath. Press plastic wrap directly on the surface while it cools if you want no skin.
- Meringue quantitiesTwo whites with only two tablespoons of powdered sugar is a very lean meringue by current practice, where two tablespoons per white is standard. It will brown quickly and is prone to weeping. Spread it so it touches the crust edge all the way round, which anchors it and limits shrinkage.
- Browning temperatureThe original gives none. A hot oven browns the peaks quickly without cooking the filling further; a moderate oven for longer gives a more stable meringue. For the marshmallow variation, watch it constantly — marshmallows scorch very fast in a hot oven.
- YieldThe quantities suit one shallow shell, roughly 8 to 9 inches, cut into six to eight slices. Refrigerate once cool and eat within a couple of days; starch-set custards weep after that.
Butterscotch pie belongs to a family of American "cream" pies — chocolate, coconut, banana, butterscotch — built on a cornstarch-thickened milk custard poured into a pre-baked shell and capped with meringue. All of them depend on cheap boxed cornstarch, which reached ordinary kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century and let cooks set a custard firmly without relying on a large number of eggs. The name is older than the pie: butterscotch as a confection of butter boiled with brown sugar is generally traced to nineteenth-century Yorkshire, and the "scotch" is usually explained as scoring or scotching the cooled slab into pieces rather than any Scottish connection, though that reading is traditional rather than proven. The marshmallow variation dates the page neatly — commercially manufactured marshmallows had become a staple grocery item by the 1910s, and cookbooks of the period pile them onto everything from sweet potatoes to pie.