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Cream Filling
1 tablespoon corn-starch
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons confectioners'
1 egg-yolk sugar
⅛ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon butter
Mix the corn-starch with two tablespoons of the milk. Heat the rest of the milk in a double boiler and stir the corn-starch paste slowly into it. Stir the mixture until it is smooth and cook it for fifteen minutes. Add the beaten egg-yolk and cook two minutes longer. Remove from the fire and add the salt, sugar and butter. Beat well. Add flavoring. Cool before spreading on layers of cake.
A plain boiled pastry cream, thickened mostly with starch and enriched with a single yolk. The ingredient column has been scrambled by the original two-column setting, so read the quantities carefully before starting.
- Reading the ingredient listThe columns have run together in the original type. The intended list is: 1 tablespoon corn-starch, 1 cup milk, 1 egg-yolk, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar, ½ teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon butter.
- The salt is almost certainly overstatedThe salt looks high -- half a teaspoon in one cup of milk will read as salty rather than seasoned. A generous pinch, or up to ⅛ teaspoon, is probably closer to what is wanted, though the text as printed does say half a teaspoon.
- SweetnessTwo tablespoons of confectioners' sugar makes a barely sweet filling, on the assumption the cake and frosting carry the sugar. If it is going between plain layers with no icing, three to four tablespoons is closer to modern taste.
- Slurry first, alwaysThe hinge of the recipe: the cornstarch must be dispersed in cold milk before it meets the hot milk. Tipped in dry it seizes into lumps that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- Fifteen minutes is not too longCornstarch needs sustained heat to lose its raw, chalky taste, and a double boiler is unlikely to scorch it. Stir often and expect a thick, glossy paste well before the time is up.
- The yolkBeat the yolk, then slacken it with a few spoonfuls of the hot starch mixture before returning it to the pan, or it will scramble in threads. The two further minutes of cooking are what set it and kill the starch-thinning enzyme yolks carry.
- Cooling and skinPress plastic wrap directly onto the surface as it cools, or beat in the butter and cover closely. A skin forms fast and breaks up into lumps when spread.
- Yield and keepingAbout one cup, enough for a single layer of an 8- or 9-inch cake. It is a milk-and-egg custard: refrigerate the filled cake and eat it within two days.
Cream filling of this kind is the thrifty domestic cousin of French crème pâtissière — same principle, but leaning on cornstarch rather than a raft of yolks. Cornstarch had been manufactured commercially in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, and by the period of books like this one it was a standard cheap thickener, letting a cook get a soft, spreadable filling from a cup of milk and a single yolk. The double boiler was equally standard equipment, a hedge against the uneven heat of a coal or early gas range, and its presence here says more about the stoves of the period than about the recipe. The layer cake it was destined for — two or three thin rounds, filling between, frosting on top — was among the defining American cake forms of the era.