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Corn Starch Pies
One quart milk, yolks of two eggs, two table-spoons corn starch, two cups sugar; mix starch in a little milk, boil the rest of the milk to a thick cream, beat the yolks and add starch, put in the boiled milk and add sugar; bake with an under crust, beat whites with two table-spoons sugar, and put on top of pies, and, when done, return to oven and brown. -Mrs. J. W. Grubbs, Richmond,
A boiled cornstarch custard poured into a pre-formed bottom crust, then finished with meringue. The proportions are written for two pies, not one, which matters more than anything else here.
- YieldA quart of milk, two cups sugar and two egg yolks fills two 9-inch shells, which is what "put on top of pies" implies. Halve everything for a single pie.
- SugarTwo cups across two pies is about a cup each, sweet by current taste but not absurd for the period. Three-quarters of a cup per pie reads better with the plain custard, and the meringue carries its own two tablespoons.
- ThickenerTwo tablespoons cornstarch to a quart of milk is a soft set even after the milk is reduced. For a filling that slices cleanly, count on about two tablespoons per pint of milk, and understand that the extra yolks a modern custard pie would use are absent here.
- "Boil to a thick cream"Probably means reducing the milk over moderate heat until it visibly coats the spoon rather than merely bringing it to a boil; on that reading it does part of the thickening work the small amount of starch cannot.
- Order of mixingAs written, the slurry goes into the yolks and the hot milk goes in after, which tempers the eggs. Add the hot milk in a thin stream while whisking, then return the whole thing to the pan and cook until it thickens and the raw starch taste is gone, since starch-set custards need a genuine boil to reach full thickness.
- "An under crust"No top crust. The original gives no oven temperature or timing. In a modern oven, blind-baking the bottom shell at 425F until dry and lightly colored, then filling and baking at 350F until the center is just set, roughly 30 to 40 minutes, works well.
- The meringueSpread it over the hot filling and seal it to the crust edge all around, or it will shrink and weep. Brown at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, or at 400F for 6 to 8 if you want the darker peaks the recipe's "return to oven and brown" suggests.
- CoolingCool at room temperature, then chill. A warm cornstarch pie will not cut, and the filling firms considerably as it drops below room temperature.
Cornstarch pies belong to the long nineteenth-century family of "cream" or "custard" pies stretched with starch rather than carried entirely by eggs. Commercial cornstarch became a cheap American pantry staple after mid-century, and cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s use it freely to economize on eggs, which were seasonal and expensive; two yolks doing the work of six would seem to be the appeal. The meringue lid solves the other half of the problem, giving the two leftover whites a job and turning a plain sweetened custard into something fit to bring to the table. The Dixie Cook-Book, in a pattern common among compilation cookbooks, is built from named contributions of exactly this kind, and Mrs. Grubbs's version is typical of the genre: terse, proportional, and written for a cook who already knows what a thick cream looks like on a spoon.