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Rhubarb Custard Pie
1 cupful cut rhubarb 1 cupful sugar 1 tablespoonful flour 1 tablespoonful melted Crisco 2 eggs ½ teaspoonful ginger extract 1 cupful milk Crisco pastry Cut rhubarb in small pieces and mix with sugar and flour. Beat egg yolks, add milk, ginger extract, and melted Crisco. Line pie plate with pastry, and fill with rhubarb mixture. Pour custard over and bake in moderate oven until firm. Cover with meringue made with stifly beaten whites of eggs to which two tablespoonfuls powdered sugar have been added.
Sufficient for one small pie.
A single-crust custard pie from Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbook, written when the shortening was still new enough to need advertising. A few of its instructions assume knowledge the original does not spell out.
- The hinge: bake it low and longThe hinge: bake it gently and give it time -- Raw rhubarb in a thin egg custard needs time to soften without the custard curdling. "Moderate oven" in books of this period is usually read as somewhere around 325-350F, and a small pie will likely take roughly 40-50 minutes; the center should still wobble slightly when the outer inch is set. Pushing the heat higher to hurry it will scramble the eggs and weep liquid into the crust.
- Ginger extractA flavoring once bottled alongside vanilla and lemon, and now rarely seen on grocery shelves. About ½ teaspoon ground ginger, or a teaspoon of finely grated fresh ginger warmed in the milk and strained out, gives a comparable note; do not use 1½ teaspoons of ground ginger, which would overwhelm the pie.
- The melted CriscoOne tablespoon of melted shortening in the custard is there to enrich it and, not incidentally, to sell the product. Melted unsalted butter does the same job with better flavor; a neutral oil works if you want the original's blandness.
- Crisco pastryThe book has its own pastry formula, which this recipe simply cross-refers to; the stray "1 cupful sugar 4 cupfuls flour" at the end of the page belongs to some adjacent recipe and has drifted in, though there is nothing here to say which. Any standard single 9-inch crust will do. Blind-baking the shell for 10 minutes before filling helps against the sogginess a wet custard causes.
- Rhubarb prepCut the stalks into ½-inch pieces; there is no need to peel. Discard the leaves entirely, as they contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food. Letting the cut rhubarb sit with the sugar and flour for 15 minutes draws out juice that the flour then thickens.
- The meringueTwo tablespoons of powdered sugar for two whites is very lean by modern standards and will not hold long. Two tablespoons per white, added gradually to soft peaks, gives a stabler topping. Spread it onto the hot filling, sealing to the crust edge, and brown at 350F for 12-15 minutes.
- Yield"One small pie" probably means something like an 8-inch plate, perhaps six modest slices, though the book does not say. Custard pies of this kind should be cooled completely before cutting and kept refrigerated once cool.
Crisco went on sale in 1911, and the small recipe books that followed it were straightforward advertising: the formulas name the product, often more than once, and here it turns up in both the crust and the custard where an older cook would have used butter or lard. Rhubarb custard pie itself is much older than the shortening. Rhubarb was grown in American and British kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century as the first tart thing available after winter, and it is often paired with eggs, milk and a heavy hand of sugar rather than left to stand alone. The ginger extract is the period's signature touch; flavoring extracts were cheap, shelf-stable and fashionable.