Snow Pie
Make a smooth paste of two tablespoonfuls of cornstarch and three of cold water, pour on this paste one pint of boiling water, one cup of sugar, boil well, add white of one egg beaten to a stiff froth; last, add flavoring to taste, a pinch of salt.
Prepare and bake crust. Crust and filling when done and cold put together. Cover with a white icing.
A single-crust cornstarch pie of the plainest kind — no milk, no butter, no yolks — thickened on the stove and spooned into a pre-baked shell. The whole thing hinges on cooking the starch long enough.
- Blind-bake the shell fully"Prepare and bake crust" means a fully baked empty shell, since nothing goes back into the oven. The recipe gives neither a pan size nor an oven temperature; bake it in a hot oven until dry and coloured.
- Boil the starch properlyTwo tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint of water is a modest set, softer than a modern pie filling, and it will not set at all unless it boils. "Boil well" means letting it bubble and thicken for a full minute or two after it clears, stirring constantly; undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky and slumps when cut.
- The egg whiteBeat it stiff and fold it into the hot filling; the recipe does not specify whether the pan is off the heat. It lightens the mixture and pales it, which is probably the source of the name, but it will not be fully cooked by residual heat alone. If that matters to you, use pasteurised whites.
- FlavouringThe book leaves this open. A teaspoon of vanilla or almond extract, or the grated zest and juice of a lemon, are all period-appropriate; with lemon, add the juice after the pan is off the heat so the acid does not thin the starch.
- Cold, then assembledThe instruction to combine crust and filling cold is deliberate. Warm filling steams the pastry soft. Cool the filling with a piece of parchment on the surface to keep a skin from forming.
- "A white icing"In a book of this date this usually means a boiled icing — sugar syrup cooked to the thread stage and beaten into stiff egg white — or a simple water icing of confectioners' sugar and a little water. The boiled version holds up better on a wet filling.
- YieldOne pie; the recipe gives no size or slice count. It is a lean, sweet pie by modern standards; a little cream alongside is no betrayal of it.
Cornstarch pies like this one belong to the frugal end of the American pie repertoire, where a pint of water and a cup of sugar stood in for the milk, cream and multiple eggs a custard pie would demand. Commercially refined cornstarch became a cheap pantry staple in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the starch companies promoted it hard through recipe pamphlets, which is part of why turn-of-the-century books carry so many puddings and pies built on a few spoonfuls of it. The name is often said to be simply descriptive: the beaten white turns the clear boiled starch opaque and pale, and the icing finishes the effect. Pies of this type — water, sugar, starch, one egg, whatever flavouring was in the house — are the sort of thing that filled out a table when the cow was dry or eggs were dear.