No. 3201

Cream Pie

Tarte a la Creme

Line a tin pie plate with foundation paste (No. 135); raise up and pinch the edges; leave rest in a cool place, then cover the inside surface with buttered paper and fill with dry cherry pips or raw rice; partly cook the crust and empty out at once. Pour in a vessel four ounces of sugar, two and a half ounces of flour and three eggs; beat thoroughly, dilute with a pint of boiling milk, having a vanilla stick infused therein; transfer this preparation to a saucepan, thicken it over the fire and as soon as it begins to acquire consistency pour it into the crust and push into a slack oven to finish cooking.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's cream pie is a blind-baked shell filled with a pastry cream that is thickened on the stove and then set in a cool oven. The hinge is knowing when to stop stirring: the custard goes into the crust while it is still pourable, not stiff.

Foundation pasteNo. 135 is Ranhofer's basic pie dough for lining a plate. Any all-butter pâte brisée for a single crust does the same job; the recipe says only 'a tin pie plate' and gives no size.
Blind bakingButtered paper and dry cherry pips or raw rice are period pie weights. Parchment and ceramic beans or dried beans work identically. 'Partly cook' means set and pale; the recipe gives no oven setting, so treat something like 15 minutes at 400F as a modern equivalent, since the shell finishes cooking with the filling in it.
A slack ovenSlack is the coolest working oven, conventionally reckoned somewhere around 250-300F. The low heat suits a filling that is already thickened; higher heat risks curdling it or blistering the surface.
The measuresFour ounces of sugar is about half a cup plus two tablespoons; two and a half ounces of flour is a scant two-thirds cup. A pint here is 16 fluid ounces of milk. Ranhofer weighed his dry goods, and the ratios are worth keeping.
Vanilla stickA whole vanilla bean, split and steeped in the hot milk, then fished out before the milk goes into the eggs. Two teaspoons of extract stirred in off the heat is the usual substitute, though the infused bean gives the flecked, rounder flavor the recipe intends.
Thickening the custardTemper the boiling milk into the egg-sugar-flour mixture, then return it to the pan and stir constantly over moderate heat. The flour means it must reach a bubble to cook out the starch, but pull it the moment it thickens to a heavy pouring cream. Cooked to a stiff pastry cream it will not level in the shell.
Judging the bakeThe recipe gives no time; in a slack oven expect roughly half an hour, and stop when the center barely trembles, as it firms considerably as it cools. The entry sits among the cold entremets, so it was presumably served cool, though Ranhofer says nothing about chilling.
YieldOne tart; the quantity of filling suits a standard nine-inch plate and will serve six to eight, though the recipe states neither.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its French titles are not affectation — the kitchen worked in French, and a tarte à la crème is simply a tart filled with crème pâtissière, the flour-thickened egg custard codified in nineteenth-century French professional practice and still the base of éclairs, mille-feuille and fruit tarts. What makes the entry interesting is the double cooking: the custard is set on the stove first and then finished in the oven, a belt-and-braces method that guards against the weeping, curdled filling you get when a raw custard is poured into a shell and baked hard. The cherry pips called for as pie weights suggest a kitchen that threw away very little.