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Cream Pie and Its Variations
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon corn-starch
2 egg-yolks or I whole egg
¼ cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
Scald the milk. Mix the corn-starch, sugar and salt, and add hot milk slowly. Cook twenty minutes over hot water. Beat the egg-yolks and add slowly, stirring rapidly. Cool and add vanilla. Put into a baked crust. Vary in any of the following ways: Banana or orange pie-Slice fruit into baked crust and cover with custard filling. Cover top with meringue made from eggwhites.
Chocolate pie-Use only seven-eighths tablespoon corn-starch. Add two squares of grated chocolate just before removing custard from the stove. Beat well. Cover with meringue.
Coconut pie-Add two tablespoons shredded coconut to the meringue made from the egg-whites.
Nut pie-Stir one cup of chopped nuts into the filling and sprinkle the top with a few. Raisins and nuts may be used together.
Spice pie-Add two teaspoons each of ground cloves and cinnamon to the cooked filling.
Date pie-Add one cup of chopped dates. Cover with meringue.
A basic stirred custard (pastry cream) poured into a pre-baked shell, with a list of variations. Two things in the original need attention before you start: the quantity of salt, and the fact that one cup of milk does not fill a pie.
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintThe salt looks like a misprint -- a full teaspoon in one cup of milk would make the filling very salty. It is probably meant as a saltspoon, about ¼ teaspoon, which is nearer the proportion usual in custards.
- Scale it upOne cup of milk yields roughly a cup and a quarter of filling, enough for a 6-inch tart. For a standard 9-inch shell, triple everything; expect 6 to 8 servings.
- "Cook twenty minutes over hot water"This means a double boiler, not direct heat. Cornstarch thickens in two or three minutes over direct flame, but the long gentle cooking over water removes the raw starch taste and cannot scorch. Stir often; the bottom sets first.
- Cook the yolksAs written the beaten yolks go into custard that is then cooled, and they may never reach a safe or fully thickened state. Temper them with a little hot custard, return everything to the double boiler, and cook two to three minutes more, to about 170F, until it coats a spoon heavily.
- Two squares of chocolateA square was one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so use 2 oz. It was sold in blocks hard enough to grate; chopped fine works the same. Add it off the heat and stir until smooth, and note the reduced cornstarch — the cocoa solids do part of the thickening.
- MeringueThe whites left over from the yolks, beaten with about 2 tablespoons sugar per white. Spread it over filling that is still warm, seal it to the crust edge all round to stop shrinking, and bake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes until the peaks color.
- CoconutShredded coconut of the period was often unsweetened and fairly dry, though sweetened packaged coconut was sold too. Sweetened flaked coconut will make the meringue cloying; use unsweetened, and toast it lightly for more flavor.
- The spice versionTwo teaspoons each of cloves and cinnamon is heavy even for a tripled batch, and cloves in that quantity turn medicinal. Start with ½ teaspoon cinnamon and ⅛ teaspoon cloves per cup of milk and taste.
- Banana and orangeSlice the fruit thin and cover it completely with hot custard so the bananas do not brown. Orange should be sectioned and drained well, or the juice will thin the filling.
Cream pie is the plainest expression of a nineteenth-century American habit: a pre-baked shell filled with a stirred custard, which spared the cook the difficulty of baking crust and egg mixture together without a soggy bottom. Cornstarch, commercially available in the United States from the mid-1800s, is what makes this version so forgiving hat it it stabilizes the custard so that it sets firm enough to slice, something a yolk-only custard will not reliably do. The presentation here, as one base formula with seven variations hung off it, is characteristic of household manuals of the 1910s.