Home › Pastry and Cookies › Cream Filling
Cream Filling
3/4 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt teaspoon salt 2 eggs 2 cups scalded milk 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix dry ingredients; add eggs slightly beaten and pour in gradually the scalded milk. Cook 15 minutes in double boiler stirring constantly until thickened. Cool and flavor.
Chocolate Cream Filling. Add 1 squares melted chocolate to Cream Filling mixture.
Pastry, if it is to be served at all, should be light, tender and flaky. Winter wheat flour, called pastry flour, should be used, as it makes the pastry more tender than bread flour.
The lightness of the pastry depends upon the amount of air enclosed and its expansion in baking.
The flakiness depends upon the kind and amount of shortening used. All the ingredients must be cold.
Handle the dough as little as possible, and keep it as cold as possible, as heat melts the shortening and makes it difficult to handle.
This is a standard boiled pastry cream, printed here with its ingredient list mangled by the typesetting — the fragments at the top and bottom of the entry are the remains of it. Read the amounts with suspicion and lean on the method, which is sound.
- The broken ingredient listAs printed, the recipe gives a fraction-less "teaspoon salt", 2 eggs, 2 cups scalded milk, 1 teaspoon vanilla, "1 squares" chocolate and a stray "1 cup flour" that has floated down from the pastry note. No sugar is listed at all. A cream filling of this era is conventionally built on about 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 to 1/3 cup flour and 1/4 teaspoon salt to 2 cups milk, but that is reconstruction, not what the page says.
- "Mix dry ingredients"Presumably sugar, flour and salt whisked together dry before the eggs go in, though the list is cut off; mixing the starch dry is what keeps it from lumping. The 1 cup flour printed at the foot of the entry most likely opens a pie-crust recipe rather than belonging here; a cup of flour in 2 cups of milk would set into a paste.
- Scalded milkHeated to just below the boil, around 180F, when small bubbles ring the pan. With raw milk this also served to pasteurise it; with modern milk it simply shortens the cooking.
- Tempering"Pour in gradually" is the hinge. Add the hot milk to the eggs in a thin stream while whisking, not the reverse, or the eggs scramble and the filling goes grainy.
- Fifteen minutes in a double boilerLonger than most cooks would use now, but correct for this method — a double boiler tops out near 200F, and the flour needs sustained heat to lose its raw taste and reach full thickening power. Over direct heat the same custard is done in five or six minutes; stir constantly either way and scrape the corners of the pan.
- Cool and flavorVanilla goes in off the heat, after the custard has dropped below scalding, because the flavour is volatile. Press plastic film or buttered paper directly on the surface while it cools or a skin forms.
- The chocolate variation"1 squares" is garbled; it may stand for one square, or for a fraction lost in the typesetting. Baking chocolate of the period was commonly cut into squares of about one ounce, which in this quantity gives a mild chocolate note.
- YieldAbout two cups — enough to fill a nine-inch cream pie or to layer an eight-inch two-layer cake. Refrigerate and use within two days.
Cream filling of this kind is the English-language descendant of French crème pâtissière, often thickened with flour rather than cornstarch in American books before the middle of the twentieth century, though cornstarch fillings were common in the same period — flour was cheaper, always in the house, and gave a softer, less glossy set. The pastry note that has been swept into the same entry is characteristic of the genre too, with its insistence on winter wheat pastry flour, cold ingredients and minimal handling; and the opening clause, "Pastry, if it is to be served at all," is a small monument to the era's suspicion of rich food.