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Pastry and Confectionery (CREAM PIE Butter size of egg)
CREAM PIE. - Butter size of egg, a cup sugar and two eggs beaten together, add one-third cup milk and two cups flour mixed with two teaspoons baking powder before sifting; bake in two tins for two pies, when done cut smoothly apart and spread with this filling; one pint milk leaving out enough to wet half a cup flour, and boil remainder, two-third cups sugar, yolks of two eggs, stir these together and boil three minutes. When cold flavor with lemon or vanilla and spread between upper and lower crusts, when cut smoothly apart, ice the tops if desired. - Mrs. Gov. J. P. Knott, Frankfort, Ky.
This is a two-layer sponge-type cake baked in pie tins and filled with a flour-thickened pastry cream — what most cooks now call Boston cream pie. The filling is the part that decides whether it works.
- Butter size of eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Cream it with the sugar and eggs rather than simply beating everything at once.
- The batter is unusually stiffTwo cups flour to one-third cup milk plus two eggs gives a very thick batter, closer to a drop dough than a pouring one. If it will not spread in the pan, add milk a spoonful at a time until it just levels when the tin is tapped. A quarter teaspoon of salt, which the recipe omits, is worth adding.
- Tins and ovenUse two 8- or 9-inch round pans, greased and floured. The recipe gives no oven temperature; about 350F for 20 to 25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean, suits this batter.
- Cutting the layers apart"Cut smoothly apart" means splitting each baked layer horizontally with a long serrated knife once fully cool, giving four thin rounds — two filled pies. Splitting a warm cake will tear it.
- The filling must actually boilHalf a cup of flour needs a genuine boil to lose its raw, pasty taste and set properly. Whisk the flour slurry, sugar and yolks into the scalded milk and keep whisking hard over the heat for the full three minutes; it will be thick enough to hold a line from the whisk. Strain it if any lumps form.
- Flavor cold, not hotVanilla and especially lemon extract are volatile and largely cook off. Add them once the cream has cooled, then chill it before spreading.
- The leftover whitesTwo whites remain from the yolks. They could go toward a royal icing for the optional iced tops.
- YieldTwo filled cakes, six to eight slices each. Refrigerate once filled and eat within two days — a flour-and-egg cream does not keep.
Despite the name, this is a cake: the "pie" is often said to come from the shallow round tins American home bakers used for layer cakes well into the nineteenth century, before dedicated cake pans were common in every kitchen, and the same explanation is traditionally offered for Boston cream pie's name. Flour-thickened pastry cream of exactly this kind — a flour slurry, boiled — tended to be cheaper and more forgiving than the cornstarch versions that later replaced it. Mrs. Gov. J. P. Knott would be the wife of J. Proctor Knott, governor of Kentucky from 1883 to 1887. The names were part of the selling point, lending a compilation of ordinary receipts the air of a tour through prominent Southern households.