Heritage Pie

A long lost cousin I've reconnected with on Facebook posted a scan of an old recipe she found recently. Apparently she has been sorting through things and eliminating clutter, just as I have been doing.  Sorting recipes always slows me down because I have way too many of them and I try every year to find a way to get them more organized and get rid of duplicates. She was having a problem too, but it was more because some needed to be rewritten before being tossed. And how do you toss away a piece of paper with your own Grandmother's handwriting on it, even if it is damaged by oil and time? Such things tug at the heart.

The recipe was for a Butterscotch Pie and for some reason I downloaded it. Probably because I have my own fond memories of Vera Coughlin.

 It wasn't easy to read, so I tried running it through some editing software, but all I really succeeded in doing was to get the yellow out of the paper and changing the size. I printed off my best effort and went about trying to decipher the words that had nearly faded away. I had just rolled out the last of my Christmas pastry and needed a filling for a single crust pie. I decided this was a good time to try this heritage pie.

As I began to mix the ingredients together, I was suddenly aware that the dear lady had not spelled out tablespoon and teaspoon as even tbsp and tsp. I had to hope that "T" was tablespoon and "t" was teaspoon and that it wasn't just a quirk of her handwriting that caused her to capitalize one of the T's and not the other.

There was another part of the recipe that confused me. It looked like she wanted me to add the warm milk to the egg yolks, but if you've ever made lemon pie filling from a package, you know you would add the egg yolks to the mixture in the pot, along with some of the cold water, before adding the hot liquid. I decided to do this the same way.

In the end, it all worked out, and I will write out the recipe in a manner I can understand for future reference.

Butterscotch Pie
1/4 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
5 tbsp flour
pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla
2 egg yolks (reserve the whites for meringue)x
2 cups of milk, divided

Cream together butter, brown sugar, flour, salt and vanilla in a pot.
Beat egg yolks with a 1/2 cup of the milk and stir into sugar mixture until well blended. Heat the remaining 1 1/2 cups of milk until it's hot but not boiling and pour into the pot with the rest of the ingredients.  Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly. When bubbles break the surface, cook for another 30 seconds. Pour into cooled 9" pie shell and top with meringue.

Meringue
Beat 2 egg whites until soft peaks form.
Gradually add 1/4 cup of white sugar and beat on high for 2 minutes until stiff peaks form.

Old Dog, New Tricks

My grandsons love it when I bake something for dessert, so when I came across a recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookie Pie, I decided that sounded like a good treat for them.  I mentioned it to them and they got excited, and were all ready to help me make it.  But I was missing the main ingredient....the chocolate chips....so they had to wait until I got some.

I picked some up on my next trip to the store, and since the kids were coming back the next day, I decided to do some baking.  I turned the oven on to preheat while I followed the recipe, but when I went to pop it in the oven there was no heat.  My hubby checked the fuses, and then found the switch had burned out.  He had replaced that once before, but this time there were no replacements to be found as the stove was 40 years old.  The pie went into the freezer.

Well, I now have a new stove, with a self cleaning oven.  It even has the convection feature.  The boys will be back tonight for supper, so I took the pie out of the freezer last night to thaw, and popped it in the oven this morning at 5:30am.  I thought I'd have it cooked before the hydro rates change. As there was still someone sleeping I decided to bake the usual way, as I don't know if the convection fan makes a noise or not, and really, I wanted to see if I actually needed it.  I set the timer on the stove, and also set the timer for a couple of minutes earlier on my tablet, since I was planning to read on it elsewhere. 

When the timer went off I was already back in the kitchen.  I pushed the Stop button on the stove, but it kept beeping.  It took several seconds for me to realize it was the tablet timer that was beeping.  I shut that off, but figured I'd already disturbed the one remaining sleeping body in the house by then.  Moments later the stove timer also went off.  Why didn't the Stop button put an end to that, I wondered. I finally hit the Timer button and all was quiet again. You have to realize that I'm not used to these digital settings.  My 40 year old stove had easy to use dials!

I checked the pie, by inserting a knife in the middle.  If it comes out clean the pie is done.  Theknife wasn't clean, but then, the pie was cold from being in the fridge overnight so it's logical that it would need a bit more time.  I gave it another 5 minutes.  Then another 5, and then 10, before I finally noticed that the oven indicator light was no longer lit.  When I had pushed the Stop button, I had turned off the heat in the oven instead of the timer.

I removed the pie, preheated the oven and put the pie back in for a couple more tries.  It finally was finally cooked by 7:50am, so I didn't save any electricity.  It also made a mess of the oven. I'm not sure how as it didn't actually boil over, if you examine the crust.  I expected the smoke detector to go off as the spills really smoked as they cooked onto the bottom of my nice new clean oven. Normally I use a pie ring when I'm baking fruit pies, but I wasn't expecting a mess this time. I opened the windows to let the smoke out and was very glad that the temperature had dropped dramatically since yesterday.
 I asked a lot of questions about self cleaning ovens before I bought one.  People said they don't find they have to actually turn on the self cleaner often, as they just wipe the stove out when there is a spill.  Well, this spill will not simply wipe out.  I tried that.  I even tried the srubby side of a sponge and then a metal pot scrubber, but none of those cleaned up the mess. I'm wishing already it wasn't a self cleaning oven, as a little squirt of Easy Off would take care of that spill, no problem.  I'm apparently going to be using the self cleaner a whole lot sooner than expected and probably a whole lot more often than the people I've been speaking to.  Normally I'd be worried about baking this mess on even more with the dinner I have planned, but since the self cleaner is going to incinerate it anyway, I guess that's not a concern. 

I guess I'll learn how to use this new fangled gadget sooner or later but I can't say that I'm off to a good start.