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November 1
Menu: Irish Stew; Baked Rice Lima Beans; Macedoine Salad; Coffee; Chocolate Cream Pie Chocolate Cream Pie-2 squares chocolate, 1/4 cup cornstarch, 1 teaspoon Crisco, 1 pint milk, 2 egg whites, 1½ cup sugar, 3 egg yolks, 14 teaspoon salt, and 1 tablespoon vanilla. Melt chocolate, add sugar, cornstarch, egg yolks, salt, Crisco and milk. Cook in double boiler till thick, stirring constantly; flavor with vanilla. Pour into a baked pie crust shell, cover with meringue made by beating egg whites till stiff and adding 2 tablespoons sugar; brown in oven and serve cold.
A cornstarch-thickened chocolate custard cooked on the stove and poured into a pre-baked shell — the standard American cream pie method, here with a token spoon of Crisco standing in for butter. A few of the quantities as printed need judgment before you start.
- The squares of chocolateA "square" of the period is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this is 2 oz. Modern bars are often marked in 1 oz sections; do not substitute semisweet without cutting the sugar.
- On the sugarThe filling takes half a cup of sugar, which is in line with comparable chocolate cream recipes. Taste the custard as it thickens rather than committing all the sugar at once, since the chocolate itself may be sweetened.
- SaltRead as ¼ teaspoon salt. A whole teaspoon in a pint of milk would be aggressive.
- VanillaA tablespoon is heavy-handed by current taste; 1 to 2 teaspoons is plenty, and it goes in off the heat so the flavor is not driven off.
- Crisco hereOne teaspoon of shortening does nothing structural; it is a gloss and mouthfeel addition, and the brand is named in a recipe that hardly needs fat at all. An equal amount of butter is a straight swap.
- Double boiler and thickeningCornstarch has to get close to boiling to lose its raw starch taste and set properly; over water this can take 15 to 20 minutes of near-constant stirring. Cook until a spoon drawn through leaves a clean track, then hold a minute longer.
- Browning the meringueTwo egg whites with 2 tablespoons sugar makes a soft, thin meringue. The recipe says only "brown in oven"; spread the meringue to the crust edge on the still-warm filling and, by modern practice, brown at around 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, or briefly at a hotter oven if you want a darker top with a softer interior.
- ServingFits a 9-inch shell and gives 8 slices. "Serve cold" means fully set — at least 3 to 4 hours; the pie will not slice cleanly warm, and a meringue-topped custard pie should be refrigerated once cool.
Cream pies of this kind were among the workhorses of turn-of-the-century American baking: a pint of milk, a few eggs, a little starch and whatever flavoring was at hand, poured into a shell already baked blind and finished with a meringue that used up the whites left over from the custard. Nothing is wasted, which is much of the appeal. Cornstarch, commercially available in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century, is what made the technique dependable at home — it thickens more forgivingly than eggs alone and tolerates the long, gentle cooking a double boiler enforces. The recipe appears here because Crisco, introduced in 1911, was being promoted as a general-purpose replacement for butter and lard across the whole range of household cooking, and a calendar of dinners was an effective way to put the product's name into a year's worth of ordinary meals rather than a single showpiece dish.