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Apple Custard Pie
Peel sour apples and stew until soft, and not much water is left in them, and rub through a colander. Beat three eggs for each pie. Put in in proportion of one cup butter, and one of sugar for three pies. Season with nutmeg. - Mrs. D. G. Cross.
A contributor's shorthand recipe that assumes you already know how to line a pie plate and judge a custard. The proportions are given per pie and per three pies, so read carefully before scaling.
- The hinge: bake until just setThis is a custard thickened by eggs alone, with no flour or milk to buffer it. Pull it when the outer inch is firm and the center still trembles; carryover heat finishes it. Baked until uniformly stiff, it weeps and turns grainy.
- Quantities, restatedPer pie: 3 eggs, about 1/3 cup butter, 1/3 cup sugar, nutmeg (one cup each of butter and sugar divided across three pies). The apple pulp is never measured, so you will have to judge by eye how much thick strained apple your shell will take.
- Sour applesMeans tart cooking apples, not spoiled ones. Granny Smith, Winesap, Northern Spy or Bramley all work. Sweet dessert apples will make the filling cloying, since the sugar is calculated against real acidity.
- Stew it dry"Not much water is left in them" is the whole difference between custard and soup. Cook the apples covered with only a splash of water, then uncover and drive off moisture until the pulp mounds on a spoon before it goes through the colander.
- Warm pulp, cold eggsLet the strained apple cool to lukewarm before beating in the eggs, or you will scramble them. The recipe specifies no order of mixing beyond the proportions.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature at all. A moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F, baked until the center is just barely loose, suits an egg-set custard; any timing is a modern guess rather than the book's instruction.
- Yield and servingOne pie per set of three eggs; the book names no pie size. Serve at room temperature or chilled; hot from the oven the filling has not finished firming.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the great wave of late nineteenth-century American compilations built from signed contributions by named women, and Mrs. D. G. Cross writes here the way one cook writes for another: proportions, not procedures. The pie itself sits in a large family of American egg-and-butter pies — transparent pie, chess pie, cheesecakes made without cheese — in which eggs and butter do much of the thickening, and in this instance no milk appears at all. Strained stewed apple made a cheap base: soft windfall and storage apples were cooked down for sauce and apple butter in any case, and a colander turned them into something smooth enough to pass for custard. Nutmeg is a period-typical seasoning here; whole nutmegs kept and traveled well and were among the standard sweet spices in American pastry.