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Butterscotch Pie
1 egg 3 tablespoonfuls water 1 cupful dark brown sugar 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful milk 3 tablespoonfuls flour 1 tablespoonful powdered sugar 1 baked crust 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Put yolk of egg into saucepan, add brown sugar, flour, milk, water, Crisco, salt, and vanilla. Stir over fire until it thickens and comes to boiling point. Pour into baked pie shell. Beat up white of egg, then beat powdered sugar into it. Spread on top of pie and brown lightly in oven. Sufficient for one pie.
A stovetop flour-thickened butterscotch filling poured into a pre-baked shell and topped with a one-egg meringue. It comes together in about fifteen minutes, and the only tricky part is making sure the starch actually cooks.
- Bring it to a full boilFlour-thickened fillings must reach a genuine boil and hold it for a minute or two, stirring constantly, or the starch will not set and the filling will taste pasty. The instruction to stir "until it thickens and comes to boiling point" is doing real work here.
- CriscoThe book is an advertisement for hydrogenated vegetable shortening, so Crisco appears in everything. In a butterscotch filling the fat is there for richness and gloss only; 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter is the better modern substitute and adds flavour the shortening cannot.
- Temper the yolkThe recipe has you drop the raw yolk straight into the cold saucepan with everything else, which works because nothing is hot yet. Whisk it smooth with the flour and a little of the milk before adding the rest, or you will chase lumps.
- Dark brown sugarPeriod dark brown sugar may have carried more molasses than today's supermarket product. Ordinary supermarket dark brown works; light brown will give a paler, flatter butterscotch.
- Browning the meringueThe recipe gives no temperature. As modern guidance, around 400F for 5 to 8 minutes, watched closely, will brown it; 350F for 12 to 15 minutes cooks the white further through. A broiler will do it in under two minutes but scorches without warning.
- The meringue is skimpyOne white beaten with a single tablespoon of powdered sugar gives a thin, loose topping that weeps easily. Two whites with 2 tablespoons of sugar each, beaten to firm peaks, covers a 9-inch pie properly. Spread it so it touches the crust all round to keep it from shrinking.
- CoolingPour the filling into the shell while hot, meringue it at once, then cool completely — at least three hours — before cutting. Warm butterscotch filling will run across the plate.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Refrigerate leftovers; a milk-and-egg filling should not sit out.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to persuade American cooks that a hydrogenated cottonseed oil shortening belonged in a kitchen that had run on butter and lard. The recipes are conventional turn-of-the-century American home cooking with Crisco inserted wherever a fat is called for, which is why it turns up in a custard filling where butter would have been the traditional choice. Butterscotch pie itself belongs to a large family of stirred, starch-thickened pies chocolate, lemon, coconut, banana that flourished once refined flour and cheap brown sugar were reliably available, and it was popular precisely because it needed no oven beyond the shell and a moment of browning. The name is often traced to nineteenth-century English boiled sweets of butter and brown sugar; the "scotch" has attracted several competing folk explanations, none of them settled.