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Apple Custard Pie
Peel, core and chop up enough apples to make the number of pies desired, stew them in not more than sufficient water to keep them from burning. When done, mash well, and add to each quart of fruit the following: Four eggs (well beaten), one pint of sweet milk, four ounces of butter (melted), a grated nutmeg, one teaspoonful of lemon juice, and a half pound of powdered sugar. When the apples are cool, stir all up together and bake in a rich pastry crust.
Oscar gives quantities per quart of apple pulp and no oven instructions at all, which is typical of the period. The proportions work, but a few of the terms mean something different now.
- The hinge: cool the apples firstThe recipe is explicit about it. Stirring beaten eggs into warm apple pulp scrambles them and the custard will never set smoothly. Let the pulp come down to room temperature, then combine.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One quart of mashed apple plus the custard should fill roughly two 9-inch pies, or one deep dish with a little left over; that works out to something like 3 lb of apples before peeling.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which older recipes used with soda. Whole milk is right here; skim gives a thin, weepy custard.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this era this means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-containing confectioners' sugar sold today. Use 8 oz (about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons) granulated.
- A whole grated nutmegThat is about 2 to 3 teaspoons of ground nutmeg for two pies, assertive by modern taste. Half a nutmeg, or 1 teaspoon ground, reads as spiced rather than medicinal.
- Stewing the apples"Not more than sufficient water to keep them from burning" means a few tablespoons in a covered pan over low heat. Excess water thins the custard and it will not firm up; if the pulp looks loose, cook it down before measuring your quart.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A custard pie of this kind is best started hot, around 425F for 15 minutes to set the crust, then dropped to 325-350F for 30 to 40 minutes until the center barely trembles and reads 175F.
- "Rich pastry crust"A butter or lard shortcrust. Because the filling is wet, partially blind-baking the shell before filling helps, though the original does not call for it.
Custard pies and apple pies both predate American cookery by centuries, and the hybrid, apple pulp bound with eggs and milk rather than layered in slices, dispenses with the need for apples firm enough to hold their shape when sliced. The absence of oven temperature is the clearest period marker: Oscar Tschirky published in 1896, when many home cooks still worked with wood or coal ranges judged by hand and by how quickly a scrap of paper browned, and printed recipes gave proportions and left the fire to the cook's judgment. The instruction to scale "to make the number of pies desired" suggests that a formula per quart of fruit was more useful here than a fixed single-pie recipe.