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Cream Pie
Mix one-half pound of sugar, three tablespoonfuls of flour, one quart of milk, and the yolks of half a dozen eggs together, and put them into a saucepan; season with a little wine, grated nutmeg, lemon or vanilla, and boil the mixture for twenty minutes. Prepare some rich pastry, line a shallow dish, bake lightly and fill up with the cream, then bake again until it is quite done. Take a little sugar and some of the whites of the eggs and make a meringue, pour it over the pie, and put into a hot closet or warming-oven to brown lightly.
This is a flour-thickened pastry cream baked into a pastry shell and finished with meringue — essentially a cream pie built from three separate cooking stages. The measurements are workable, but the timing on the custard is the part that needs rethinking.
- The twenty-minute boilA quart of milk with only three tablespoons of flour and six yolks will thicken within two or three minutes of reaching a simmer, and holding it at a boil for twenty minutes risks curdling the yolks and scorching the bottom. Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until it thickens and the raw flour taste is gone — a couple of minutes past the first bubble is enough.
- Half a pound of sugarThat is about 1 1/8 cups (227 g) granulated. It is a sweet filling by modern taste; three-quarters of a cup makes a custard most people prefer, especially with a sugared meringue on top.
- "Season with a little wine"Most likely a fortified wine: sherry, Madeira or Marsala. A tablespoon or two, stirred in off the heat so the aroma survives. Use the wine or the vanilla or the lemon, not all three.
- Blind baking"Bake lightly" means a partial blind bake: line the shell, weight it, and give it 15 minutes at 400F, then remove the weights and give it another 5 until the surface is dry and pale. This keeps the base from going sodden under the wet custard.
- The second bakeSince the filling is already cooked, the second bake is only to set the custard into the crust and finish the pastry. Twenty to twenty-five minutes at 350F, until the centre barely trembles.
- "A hot closet or warming-oven"A hot closet was the plate-warming compartment of a coal range, holding a gentle heat well below oven temperature. For browning meringue, 375F for 12-15 minutes gives a firmer, safer result than a bare gloss of colour; a broiler will brown it in a minute but leaves the interior of the meringue barely warm.
- The meringueSix whites are left over from the yolks. Beat them to soft peaks with about 2 tablespoons of sugar per white, and spread the meringue so it touches the pastry rim all the way round — that seal is what stops it shrinking and weeping.
- YieldOne quart of custard is a great deal for a single pie. Expect to fill a deep 9- or 10-inch shell generously, serving eight to ten, or to make two shallow pies.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name sold this 1896 book, was not strictly a cook, and much of *The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf* reads as a compilation of standard American and continental practice of the day rather than of hotel secrets. Cream pie is a case in point: a plain boiled custard of milk, yolks, sugar and a little flour, poured into pastry and capped with meringue, appears in many household manuals of the period, differing chiefly in whether the cook flavoured it with wine, nutmeg, lemon or vanilla. The instruction to brown the meringue in a "hot closet or warming-oven" places the text in the coal-range kitchen, where the enclosed warming compartment held a low, dry heat and was a natural place to set colour on a meringue without risking the custard beneath. A pastry cream cooked on the stove and then baked a second time in the shell is the sort of method later counter-service cream pies dispensed with, setting the filling by refrigeration instead.