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Lemon Custard Pie
Lightly butter a pie dish one and a half inches deep. Line it with a pie paste. Trim well all around the edges. Cover the paste with a buttered paper; fill the plate with dried white beans; set in the oven and bake for twenty minutes, or until the paste is perfectly firm and well browned. Set the dish on a table to cool for five minutes, then remove the beans and paper. Place three ounces fine sugar in a vessel, break in four whole eggs and sharply beat up for five minutes; then add a pint cold milk, one teaspoon vanilla essence and the juice of a good-sized, sound lemon; briskly mix for three minutes longer. Strain through a Chinese strainer into the pie dish. Place in a brisk oven to bake for thirty minutes. Remove, let get cold and serve.
A plain baked custard pie with a fully blind-baked shell. The instructions are sound apart from the oven heat, which is far hotter than a custard will tolerate.
- Oven heat is the hingeA "brisk oven" in this period means roughly 400-425F, hot enough to boil an egg custard and leave it curdled and weeping. Bake the filling at 325-350F instead, and judge by set rather than clock: the edges firm, the centre still wobbling like loose jelly, about 170F at the middle.
- Blind bakingBake the lined shell at about 400F for the twenty minutes given, or until firm and browned as the recipe directs, with the paper and beans in place. The beans can be cooled, jarred and reused many times for this purpose, though they are no longer fit to eat.
- Weights and volumesThree ounces of fine sugar is about 7 tablespoons, a scant half cup; "fine" here means caster or ordinary granulated, not confectioners'. A pint of milk is 2 cups. The recipe specifies only that the dish be one and a half inches deep; a pint of milk with four eggs suits a 9-inch plate.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the cone-shaped fine mesh sieve. Any fine sieve does the job, and the straining matters: it catches chalazae and any threads of set egg so the custard bakes smooth.
- Lemon juice and milkAcid curdles dairy. Beat the eggs and sugar, add the milk, then the lemon juice last and mix only long enough to combine, and pour into the shell straight away rather than letting it stand.
- Whole milkThe recipe assumes milk with its cream in it. Skim milk gives a thin, watery set; use whole milk, or replace a few tablespoons of it with cream.
- Sealing the crustA brushing of beaten egg white over the hot blind-baked shell, returned to the oven for a minute, keeps the liquid custard from soaking into the pastry.
- Cooling and yieldThe instruction to let it get cold is not optional; the custard finishes setting as it cools. One pie, six to eight servings, and it should be refrigerated once cool if not eaten the same day.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its method here shows a professional habit: the shell is blind-baked to a finish before any custard goes near it, where many American household books of the same years poured the custard into a raw shell, with predictably soggy results. The pie itself belongs to the old family of baked milk-and-egg custards that runs back through English and French cookery, flavoured in this case with both vanilla and lemon rather than the more usual nutmeg. It is worth noting what it is not: this is not lemon meringue pie, which is thickened with cornstarch and crowned with whipped whites. Here the eggs do all the setting, and the lemon is a note of sharpness in a soft custard rather than the body of the filling.