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May 11
Menu: Fish Soup; Salt Cod Fish Balls; Steamed Brown Bread; Dressed Shredded Cabbage; Cream Pie; Coffee Cream Pie-3 eggs, 3 tablespoons sugar, 3 tablespoons flour, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1½ pints milk, and 1 teaspoon lemon extract. Mix sugar and flour and then put into a saucepan, then add yolks of eggs, Crisco, milk and flavoring. Stir constantly until it thickens and then divide into 2 baked pie crusts and cover with a meringue made of whites of eggs.
A stovetop pastry cream stretched across two pies, from a promotional cookbook whose job was to put Crisco into every dish on the page. The proportions are lean by modern standards and the method skips several steps a competent cook will supply.
- YieldThree eggs and 1½ pints of milk fill two 8- or 9-inch baked shells, so figure twelve to sixteen servings. Halve everything for a single pie.
- Thickening is marginalThree tablespoons of flour to three cups of milk is a loose set, closer to a pudding sauce than a sliceable pie. Six tablespoons of flour, or four of cornstarch, gives a filling that holds a cut edge.
- Temper the yolksThe recipe has you put yolks straight into the pan with cold milk, which works if you never stop stirring, but scrambled threads are easy to get. Whisk the sugar, flour and yolks smooth, add the milk gradually, and cook over medium heat; a heatproof spatula reaching the pan corners beats a spoon.
- How far to cook itFlour-thickened cream should be brought to a boil briefly, or the raw-flour taste stays and the starch never reaches its full thickening power.
- The tablespoon of CriscoPure hydrogenated shortening, added here for the brand's sake where butter would be the usual enrichment. A tablespoon of butter stirred in off the heat does the same job and tastes better.
- Lemon extractA full teaspoon in this quantity reads as strongly perfumed to modern palates. Half a teaspoon, or the zest of a lemon steeped in the hot milk, is an alternative.
- The meringue needs sugarThe original says only "a meringue made of whites of eggs." Use two tablespoons of sugar per white, beaten in gradually after the whites reach soft peaks, and spread it so it touches the crust edge all the way round or it will shrink and weep.
- Browning the meringueThe book assumes you know the oven step. Bake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes until the peaks are evenly tan, then cool away from drafts; the pie needs several hours in the refrigerator before it will slice.
- The stray line"May 12 Fried Fish, Tartare Sauce" belongs to the book's dated dinner menus, not to the pie.
Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco in 1911, and The Story of Crisco followed in 1913: advertising in the shape of a cookbook, its recipes engineered to include the new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening whether the dish wanted it or not. A tablespoon of Crisco in a pastry cream is the tell. The recipes were credited to Marion Harris Neil, a cookery writer then serving as cookery editor of Ladies' Home Journal. The dated menu line on this page points to one of the Crisco books' calendar-of-dinners sections, which laid out menus across the year so a housekeeper never had to decide what to serve. Cream pie itself predates the book: a boiled custard poured into a blind-baked shell and capped with meringue was familiar in nineteenth-century American home baking, and it could be built on a shell baked the day before.