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Cream for Fruit Pies
Put one pint of milk into a stewpan with the rind of a lemon and a little cinnamon. Meanwhile take the yolks of two eggs and whisk them well with one tablespoonful of flour and two tablespoonfuls of cream and put them into a stewpan. Place the pan containing the milk on the fire and let it simmer, and just as it boils add it gradually to the eggs, putting the pan containing them over the fire and whisking until of the consistence of cream, then remove it from the fire as it gets a little cool, put in one tablespoonful of orange or rose-flower water. Let it become quite cold. Remove the crust from a fruit-pie and pour in the cream, replacing the crust. Some cooks cut it into quarters, though this is not necessary. Great care should always be taken not to let the cream boil, as it quickly curdles.
This is a thin pastry cream — a crème pâtissière with only two yolks and a spoonful of flour to a pint of milk — meant to be poured under the lid of a baked fruit pie. The hinge is in the last line: hold it below a boil or the eggs scramble.
- The one ruleCook the custard to about 175-180F, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon and just thickens. With only a tablespoonful of flour there is little starch to protect the yolks, so a boil is likely to curdle it rather than smooth out as it would in a stiffer pastry cream.
- QuantitiesOne pint is 2 cups of milk. Two yolks, 1 tablespoon flour and 2 tablespoons cream make a pouring custard, not a sliceable filling — expect the consistency of thick heavy cream once chilled.
- StewpanA heavy-bottomed saucepan. If you are cautious, set a bowl over simmering water instead; slower, but the custard will not catch on the base.
- Lemon rind and cinnamonPare the zest in strips with no white pith, and use a broken stick of cinnamon rather than ground, which will cloud the cream. Steep in the hot milk off the heat for 10-15 minutes, then strain before tempering into the yolks.
- Tempering"Add it gradually to the eggs" is the whole technique — the yolk mixture is already in its own pan, so pour the hot milk into it in a thin stream while whisking, then set that pan over the heat. Dumping the milk in at once will set the yolks in threads.
- Orange or rose-flower waterStill sold, though strength varies a great deal by brand and may well be more concentrated than the household waters the book assumed. Start with a teaspoon and taste; a full tablespoon of some brands will taste of soap.
- Straining and coolingPass the finished cream through a fine sieve to catch any set egg, then press plastic wrap or buttered paper onto the surface so it does not skin while cooling. It must be quite cold before it goes into the pie, or it will steam the pastry limp.
- YieldAbout 2 cups — more than enough to flood a standard 9-inch fruit pie around the fruit, with the surplus served alongside, or to serve six as a sauce if you would rather not lift the lid.
Filling a baked fruit pie with custard after the fact is an old English trick, attested in eighteenth-century cookery, where the top crust was lifted, the pie flooded with a sweet custard, and the lid set back — sometimes cut into quarters or wedges first, a step Oscar dismisses as unnecessary. The flavourings here are older than the book: lemon peel and cinnamon steeped in milk, and a finishing spoonful of orange-flower or rose water, belong to a perfumed style of English and French confectionery that is often said to have been giving way to vanilla by the end of the nineteenth century. Oscar Tschirky's volume is a compendium of what a large hotel kitchen kept on hand rather than a record of Waldorf inventions — useful to a pastry department that baked fruit pies in quantity and wanted a way to enrich them without rebuilding the pie.