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Custard Pie
Line a pie-dish with crust; put six eggs into a bowl, and beat until quite light, then add two ounces of finely-powdered white sugar and a pint and a half of milk, and mix well; put this into the dish and bake in a moderate oven for thirty minutes. Take it out and grate a little nutmeg over the top. If it is to be served cold, stand it in cold water in a cool place, because if it does not cool at once the crust gets soaked and spoiled.
A plain baked custard in a shell, written for cooks who already knew how custard behaves. Two things need attention: the oven is hotter and steadier than Oscar's, and the quantity of liquid is larger than thirty minutes will usually set.
- Quantities in modern termsA pint and a half of milk is 3 cups; two ounces of powdered sugar is about 1/4 cup, which makes this a barely sweet custard by current taste. Six eggs to 3 cups milk is a firm, sliceable set rather than a soft one.
- "A moderate oven"Read as 350F. Many cooks now drop to 325F for custard, since the slower set reduces the risk of the filling weeping or curdling at the edges while the centre is still loose.
- Thirty minutes is optimisticThree cups of custard in a pastry shell will usually want 40 to 55 minutes. Judge by the custard, not the clock: pull it when the outer two inches are set and the centre still wobbles as a single mass, or at 170-175F on an instant-read thermometer. It firms as it cools.
- The hinge: the crustOscar's closing warning is the real instruction. Custard and raw pastry cook at cross purposes, so blind-bake the shell until dry and pale gold, and pour the custard in while the shell is still hot. Cooling promptly, as he says, keeps the residual steam from soaking the base.
- Strain and skimBeating six eggs "until quite light" leaves foam and stringy bits of white. Pass the mixture through a sieve and skim the surface before it goes into the shell, or the baked top will be bubbled and coarse.
- CoolingStanding the dish in cold water works, but keep the water well below the rim. Once it is at room temperature the pie should go into the refrigerator; a milk-and-egg custard is not a thing to leave out for the afternoon.
- What is missingThere is no salt and no vanilla, and the nutmeg is grated on after baking rather than stirred in. A pinch of salt is worth adding; grating the nutmeg over the hot top, as written, gives more aroma than baking it in.
- YieldProbably one 9-inch pie (the recipe says only 'a pie-dish'), six to eight slices.
Custard pie is one of the oldest things in the English-language pie repertoire: the word custard descends from Anglo-Norman crustade, a dish defined by its crust, and medieval recipe collections use the term for a range of fillings bound with egg — savoury meat and fish as well as sweet — set in pastry. By the time Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, compiled his enormous 1896 Cook Book, the dish had long since become domestic rather than grand, which is why it appears here in its barest form, with no vanilla, no cream and only a couple of ounces of sugar. The instructions read as reminders to a professional kitchen rather than a teaching recipe, and the only thing Oscar bothers to explain at length is the soggy bottom, which suggests where the complaints came from.