Pieblogging: The Controversy Rages On

Ladies and Gentlemen and Gibletses, I bring you the most controversial pie of all: the Boston Cream Pie.

Not only is the filling not completely enclosed by the crust, thank you very much Mr. Strict Pie Contructionists at Unfogged, there is no crust at all. Only cake. Adding further non-pie characteristics to the lack of crust injury, there is a frosting-type thing, long regarded as anathema to pie. And yet, read 'em and weep, boys, because it is a Cream Pie. And you can make it at home, by following these EZ instructions. Well, moderately easy. Well, as pies go, it's a pain. Totally worth it, though.

UPDATE: I can't imagine anyone deciding to make this who had never made homemade pudding before, but just in case, when I tell you not to chicken out and to let the custard actually boil for a short time, I mean boil as in tiny bubbles come to the surface directly over thye gas ring, not boil as in rolling boil.

Also, due to a mystic connection between myself and Fafnir, much like that between Choco Leibniz and Fig Newton, Fafblog contemporaneously-yet-independently weighs in on Boston Cream Pie here.

Boston Cream Pie

For the Sponge Cake:
1 1/2 c flour
1 1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
3/4 c milk
3 T unsalted butter
1 T vanilla extract
1 t almond extract
3 large eggs
1 1/4 c sugar

For the Pudding:
1/4 c cornstarch
2 c milk
4 large egg yolks
1 t vanilla extract
1/2 c sugar
2 T unsalted butter, chopped

For the Chocolate Glaze:
3 T strong brewed coffee
2 T light corn syrup
1/2 c sugar
4 oz bittersweet chocolate

1. Spray a 9-inch pie plate with Pam (or cake pan, but it undermines my contentions about the nature of the dessert). Preheat oven to 350.

2. Sift dry ingredients together. Bring milk and butter to a boil in a small saucepan (or do it in the microwave, but be careful it doesn't boil over and make a mess.) Remove from heat and add extracts.

3. Mix eggs and sugar until pale, fulffy and doubled in volume. Drizzle in the hot milk mixture with the beaters running. Then remove beaters and fold in flour mixture well (sponge cakes have a tendency to develop little dry nuggets of flour in the cake if you don't.)

4. Pour mixture into prepared pan and bake for 25 minutes or so, till golden brown and cake tester comes out clean. Cool on a rack, then remove from pan.

5. While the cake is baking, make the pudding: whisk the cornstarch together with 1/2 cup of the milk in a mixing bowl. Let rest 1 minute, then whisk again. Mix in egg yolks and sugar.

6. In a medium saucepan, bring remaining milk just to the boil. Then drizzle the hot milk into the bowl, whisking constantly so the eggs don't curdle. Rinse out the saucepan, but don't dry it; the water will help keep the custard from scorching. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat, whisking constantly and scraping along the bottom and edges of the pan. Really let it boil for 15 seconds or so; the cornstarch will keep it from breaking, and if you chicken out it won't set up properly (I just did this).

7. Pour through a strainer into a clean bowl. Stir in vanilla extract and then butter, stirring till it's all melted. Cover with plastic wrap touching the surface of the pudding, stabbing a few holes in the wrap with a knife so the steam can escape. Let cool, then cool completely in fridge, at least 3 hours. (I guess you could make the pudding first to speed things along).

8. Make the glaze (it's best to do this just before you assemble the cake). Put the chopped chocolate in a bowl. Bring the coffee, sugar and corn syrup to a boil in a small saucepan and cook till sugar crystals are dissolved (just a minute or so). Pour over chocolate in bowl, let sit for a minute, and then stir till chocolate is melted and glaze is glossy. Let cool slightly.

9. Now assemble your pie: cut the cake layer in half. This is best achieved by cutting a shallow groove with a bread knife right in the middle of the side at four points, then connecting those cuts with a shallow groove running all the way around the cake, then cutting slowly through from the outside in, holding your palm against the top of the cake to prevent shifting. This will give you an even division. Set the domed top half aside. Put the pudding on the bottom half, top with the domed half, and then spread the glaze on with an icing spatula using as few strokes as possible.

This pie is best assembled just before you eat it, but you can put leftovers in the fridge, and ain't none going to get thrown out, I'll tell you that.

Comments

[ogged]

Does Belle ding when we bop her on the head? That's no pie.

[belle]

ogged, I refer you to the title of the dessert product: Boston Cream Pie. I grant that it is a pie in name only, being more of a cream-filled spongecake to the untrained eye. Viewed sub specie aeternitatis, who is to say? Possibly the Medium Lobster. I pass over your crude allusion to my name in silence.

[Kieran]

Does Belle ding when we bop her on the head? That's no pie.

OK then ogged, in that case I'll have your slice. Mmmm. Boston Cream Pie.

[claudia]

Easy trick to get the cake layer in half: when you have your groove, take a long piece of twine, insert into the groove, cross the ends over and pull gently. Works like a charm.

[bryan]

Has any pie ever been more misnamed?! I looked through all those ingredients, there is no mention of Boston. The question is, as always, what would Godzilla eat, and it's not Boston Cream Pie, I can guarentee you that!

Some people, bad people, claim that Boston Cream Pie was named after its country of origin. This is wrong. Boston Cream Pie as any crazy ranting on the intarweb knows, was first built in Philadelphia by our hostess' namesake, the great heroine of '76, Libertaire Belle! It was built not in Boston or of Boston, but to protect Boston from the Britainers and also their groupies, the hessian chicks. Libertaire Belle was a french girl who had a thing for Lafayette, and came over to help the U.S fight for something or other. I think it was money, but it might have been cake. I remember when the philadelphians tried to eat the pie, she said let them eat cake, which considering she was giving up her own supply in the cause of our freedom was pretty big of her. And quite contrary to solid Libertarian principles I might add.

So let us use this day in rememberance of a true american heroine from France, Libertaire Belle. God bless her, every bit.

[FL]

I refute you thus: a toy gun is not a gun; a silk flower is not a flower; a Boston Cream Pie is not a pie. We of unfogged are no crude literalists.

[fafnir]

You are crazy Mr Ogged. Crazy like a pie-crazed thing! It is obvious you are a crust supremacist and do not recognize crustless pies as "pure." Yours is a cold cold world Mr Ogged. A cold cold world.

I also blogged on Boston cream pies the other day. Independently like Newton and Liebniz!

[The Medium Lobster]

A toy gun is indeed a gun, FL. The gun's gun-nature is modified by its toy-nature; it is both toy and gun. It is simply a gun which was designed primarily not to fire bullets but to function as a child's plaything.

You will most likely sputter some nonsense about how a gun is designed to fire bullets whereas a toy gun is not. A pellet gun is not designed to fire bullets, nor does a musket; both are guns. You will then counter that these are still designed to fire projectiles; by that definition, airsoft guns, paintball guns, and even some water guns would fit the definition of "gun." And once again, a toy gun is a gun.

You are always welcome to stop by for further lessons from the Medium Lobster.

[aeon skoble]

"a Boston Cream Pie is not a pie"
Not only that, an "egg cream" contains neither eggs nor cream. There's probably an apt quotation from Wittgenstein that covers this, but I'm sure I don't know it.

[ogged]

My good Fafnir, they don't call it the cold light of reason for nothing. Do you think I wouldn't enjoy living in a world with typing lobsters and crustless pies? But, who knows? Maybe the fantasy world is the real world, after all.

The name Boston Cream Pie is believed to be a misnomer as it really is a cake. Maybe it was due to the fact that in New England the colonists used to bake cakes in pie tins as most people only had pie pans not cake pans. The first reference to Boston Cream Pie was when a New York newspaper in 1855 ran a recipe for a 'pudding pie cake'.

[fafnir]

There is no joy in the Joy of Baking an I for one do not consider it an authoritative resource as its own misnaming of itself makes it suspect.

Now if you could cite authoritative texts such as "Alice Through the Looking Glass" or "Goodnight Moon" or "Uncle Pie's World O Pies" then I would take a look.

[Fontana Labs]

As Aristotle said, we must love the truth more than we love the Medium Lobster. Imagine, if you will, an object made of solid plastic, designed to resemble a handgun and for the sake of a child's amusement. One form of toy gun, in other words. It shoots nothing; it merely resembles another thing that shoots projectiles. Is it a gun? I think it is not, and the honest among us would agree. (I need not deny that some objects are both toys and guns; I need only insist that there are some objects that are toy guns yet not guns.) Yet this is a toy gun. Hence "gun" cannot be inferred from "toy gun." Hence by analogy "pie" cannot be inferred from "Boston Cream Pie." Ordinary language has failed us.

O my Medium Lobster, I believe your tuition bill is past due.

[Fontana Labs]

More evidence, though I think by now the case is conclusive.

New England is not only the birthplace of the diner but also of Boston Cream Pie. Originating in the early nineteenth century, Boston Pie, as it was then called, was a plain two layer sponge cake filled with a vanilla custard. In 1855, a German-born pastry chef at Boston's Parker House Hotel spruced up the classic cake by adding a luscious chocolate glaze topping and the dessert (now known as Boston Cream Pie) has remained popular to this day. In keeping with the diner tradition of tall cakes, my version consists of four layers filled with a deliciously light custard, leaving you to declare, "Who cares if they call it a pie when it's really a cake?"

And here, or here, or here.

[The Medium Lobster]

Fontana Labs, I'm afraid you've failed midterms. If a toy gun is a thing that resembles another thing that shoots projectiles, then you make the claim that a toy gun does not shoot projectiles and that a gun does; I offer you the squirt gun, the pop gun, the cap-and-cork gun, the air gun, the paintball gun, the airsoft gun, all of which can fire projectiles and all of which are toys. I'm afraid you must deny that some objects are both toys and guns, because what else is a toy gun? If you can't grasp this elementary grain of knowledge, friend, the Medium Lobster has little hope for you.

And with that, I believe class is dismissed.

[fafnir]

I quote from Maxwell's Field Guide to Pies and Crockery:

The Boston Cream Pie split off from the now-extinct Portuguese Pudding Pie in the late 17th century. It is believed that the Boston Cream shed its crust in the mid 18th century as it adapted to become an aquatic species, and indeed the Cape Cod Crisp is believed to be a descendent of this watery offshoot, but by the mid-1920s it had returned to land and assumed the form we recognize today. Often mistaken for a species of cake by amatuer pie-spotters and dim-witted Nazi robots, the Boston Cream's closest genetic relatives include the Banana Cream, the Lemon Merangue, the New Hampshire Spotnitz, and the Mongolian Quiche.

[ogged]

Fontana hasn't jumped in, so I will. My good shrinking Lobster, Fontana wrote, "by analogy 'pie' cannot be inferred from 'Boston Cream Pie.'" That just means that something called a "pie" isn't necessarily a pie. There can be toy guns that are properly called "guns," but because there are toy guns that are not guns, the name itself can't be our guide.

Fafnir, you almost had me with the natural history, but you slipped with the Mongolian Quiche, which (Mongolia being a landlocked, desert country), couldn't be descended from an aquatic species. We're all friends here, but I'm wondering if you made some of that up.

[Kip Manley]

No need for such language, ogged. The Boston cream pie is like a dolphin that has returned to land, there to unbind its fins into fingers and do something about that tail: it was an aquatic creature, yes, but before that it was a land-locked, vaguely bovine creature. (In fact, I believe the shaggy ur-dolphin was, indeed, an habitue of the seedier of Mongolia's deserts; the latest paleontological evidence suggests it died out when its breeding grounds were overrun by the similarly extinct bald panda.) So there's nothing in the Boston cream pie's formerly aquatic nature that prevents it from clasping its cousin the landlocked Mongolian quiche to its genetic bosom. But! A dedicated pieologist will remember that the "Mongolian" quiche is something of a misnomer: in the 1930s, after all, a few breeding pairs of Mongolian gerbils were brought into the United States by way of Japan, and were so profligate that every one of the millions of gerbils in America today is descended from one or another of those Mayflower pioneers. At roughly the same time, a humble pie was proving unprecedentedly popular in the lunchcarts that serviced skyscraper construction crews in midtown Manhattan. One day at the height of this fad, a lunchcart impresario (his name lost in the mists of time) turned to one of his peers and remarked, "Well, danged if that 'quiche' ain't spreadin as fast as them Mongolian gerbils!" The improbable moniker stuck, bedeviling food critics ever since, and launching dozens of urban myths about the "landlocked" origins of a tasty comestible which, if memory serves, was first baked in Hoboken.

[belle]

Wow, you guys. I learn more stuff from having this blog. I didn't know half this stuff!

[apostropher]

Not only that, an "egg cream" contains neither eggs nor cream.

Similarly, Jack Daniels' Hard Cola contains neither Jack Daniels nor cola.