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Cream Pie
Mrs. M. A. Green.
Boil nearly one pint of new milk; take two small tablespoons of corn starch beaten with a little milk, to this add two eggs; when the milk has boiled, stir this in slowly with one scant teacup of sugar and one-half cup of butter, two teaspoons of lemon. Cakes; Three eggs, one cup of white sugar, one and a-half of flour, one teaspoon of Cook's Friend baking powder, mix it in flour ; three tablespoons of cold water; bake in two pie-pans in a quick oven; split the cake while hot, and spread in the cream.
Two recipes run together here: a boiled cornstarch custard and a hot-water sponge baked in pie pans, split and filled. The result is what most people now call a Boston cream pie.
- The hinge: cook the custard properlyCornstarch needs to reach a full boil for about a minute to thicken and lose its raw taste, and the eggs need tempering — whisk a ladle of the hot milk into the egg-and-starch slurry before it goes back into the pan. Dumping cold eggs into boiling milk gives you sweet scrambled egg.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand, associated with the McLaren firm, widely advertised in Canada around the time this book appeared. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes one for one; the recipe's single teaspoon for 1.5 cups flour is on the low side, and 1.5 teaspoons is closer to current practice.
- "Two teaspoons of lemon"Lemon extract or lemon essence, not juice. Two teaspoons of extract is assertive by modern standards; one is usually enough, or use the zest of a lemon.
- New milkSimply fresh, un-soured whole milk — the distinction mattered when milk was delivered daily and turned quickly. Whole milk is the right choice; skim gives a slack custard.
- Teacup measureA Victorian teacup is usually reckoned somewhere between three-quarters of a cup and a full cup, and period books are not consistent. A scant teacup of sugar can reasonably be read as two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup for the filling.
- Half a cup of butterThat is 4 oz in roughly a pint of milk, which makes an unusually rich, almost buttercream-like filling. It is not an error, but stirring it in off the heat at the end, a piece at a time, gives a smoother set than boiling it.
- A quick ovenUsually put at roughly 400-425F in period terms, though the ranges given vary from book to book. That is hot for a thin sponge; 375-400F for 15-20 minutes will brown the two layers without drying them.
- Splitting while hotThe recipe says to split the cake while hot, which may assume layers thick enough to be split again. With modern shallow pie pans you will get two thin layers — sandwich them as they are rather than splitting, and let them cool a little or they will tear.
- YieldOne filled cake from two pie pans (the recipe gives no size), eight to ten servings. It keeps a day in the refrigerator; the custard will weep after that.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold for the benefit of the Hospital for Sick Children — one of the earliest and most successful Canadian community fundraising cookbooks, and the model for hundreds that followed, with many recipes signed with a contributor's name as Mrs. M. A. Green's is here. The dish itself is a cake, not a pie: the name is generally traced to the practice of baking such sponges in the pie tins every kitchen already owned, at a time when dedicated cake pans were less common, and the same confection appears in nineteenth-century American books as cream pie, custard cake or Boston cream pie more or less interchangeably. Cornstarch custard of this kind was well established by the 1870s, corn starch having been manufactured commercially since the middle of the century, and it let a cook thicken a filling with far fewer eggs than a true pastry cream demands.