Cream Pie
2 cups milk 1/2 cup Karo, Red Labcl 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 2 eggs Flaky pie crust 3 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Line a deep pie plate with the crust. Heat the Karo, sugar and milk, add the egg yolks beaten with the cornstarch and salt and cook until thickened. Flavor with the vanilla, partly cool, and pour into the lined plate. Bake in a moderate oven until the crust is almost done-about twenty-five minutes. Then heap on a meringue made by beating the egg whites stiff with two tablespoons powdered sugar. Return to the oven, cook seven minutes very slowly and serve cold.
A brand-book cream pie: the filling is cooked on the stove, poured into a raw shell, and the whole thing baked just long enough to set the crust. A few points make the difference between a crisp base and a wet one.
- Blind-bake the shellPouring a hot cooked filling into raw pastry and giving it only 25 minutes guarantees a pale, soggy bottom. Bake the shell fully first, then fill it; the pie needs only the meringue browning after that.
- "Moderate oven"350F. The final "very slowly" for the meringue means a cooler oven, around 300-325F, which sets the foam without scorching it.
- Karo Red LabelKaro was sold in colour-coded grades, and Red Label was the darker, fuller-flavoured syrup, as against the near-colourless Blue. Modern dark corn syrup is the nearest match; golden syrup will work but is sweeter and more assertive.
- Argo and Kingsford'sBoth were cornstarch brands of the same company, offered interchangeably. Any plain cornstarch does the job: 3 tablespoons for 2 cups of milk gives a sliceable, not merely thick, custard.
- Cooking the fillingTemper the yolk-and-starch mixture with some of the hot milk before it goes into the pan, then bring the whole to a full bubble for a minute or two. Starch-bound custards that never boil stay thin, because an enzyme in raw yolk breaks the starch down as it cools.
- MeringueTwo tablespoons of sugar for two whites is a lean meringue by current standards and is prone to weeping. Beat to soft peaks before adding the sugar, add it gradually, and spread the meringue so it touches the crust all the way round to anchor it.
- Browning timeSeven minutes in a slow oven will barely colour the top. Give it 12-15 minutes at 325F, or 8-10 at 375F if you want the tips well browned.
- Yield and servingOne deep pie; a 9-inch plate is the likely size, though the recipe does not say, giving six to eight slices. "Serve cold" means properly chilled: this is a milk-and-egg custard and belongs in the refrigerator once cool, where it keeps a couple of days at best before the meringue starts to bead.
This comes from one of the promotional cookbooks issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, which is why the ingredient list names three of its own brands and no others: Karo syrup, and Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch. Karo was launched in the early 1900s and is generally said to have been marketed through free and cheap recipe booklets that placed the syrup into everything from candy to pie, and the cornstarch-thickened cream pie was ideal for the purpose, since it uses both a starch and a sweetener from the same catalogue. The dish itself is older than the advertising: cornstarch-bound milk custards under a meringue became standard American home baking in the second half of the nineteenth century, once cheap refined cornstarch made a firm sliceable filling possible without a heavy hand of eggs.