Creme Pie

my guess is she left out eggs..... most of the recipes I have and those I was able to find online use anywhere from 4 to 6 eggs depending on the size of the pie or if the whole egg or just the yolk is used....

my advise experiment till you get the right amount.

 

You certainly can make a cream pie without eggs; but neither the technique nor the pie itself are well known throughout most of the US.

It's hard to know what was going on in Grandma's head. However, there's a kind of cream pie made without eggs called a "Sugar Cream," a "Hoosier Cream", or sometimes a "Brown Sugar Cream" (using guess what). It was kind of regional -- most of its popularity around Indiana, Kentucky, Southern Illinois, etc., back in the day; and the recipe seems to date back to the mid nineteenth century.

Grandma's recipe should work for that sort of pie; and I don't know what you're doing wrong.

There's usually a bit of pre-cooking in order to get the flour into the cream without lumps, and Gran doesn't seem to have included any -- So it may not be a sugar cream (or creme, if you prefer).

I've never made a sugar cream, so rather than just offer speculation based on normal technique, I'm going to recommend googling the terms Hoosier Cream Pie and Sugar Cream Pie and seeing what you come up with. I think you'll have best results with something that calls for getting the flour into the cream over heat, then getting the pie in the oven while the custard was still hot. Darn, I wasn't going to say that.

Well, google it anyway. Don't take my word for it.

It's easy enough to doctor Gran's recipe to make a custard pie, even though, other advice notwithstanding, it's almost certainly not what she intended.

It is easier still to make a custard pie with an actual, tested and perfected formula of which there are kajillions. Rather than farting around trying to "make it work" by adding egg yolks and whole eggs in various numbers and combinations, just google custard pies and you're sure to find a recipe you like from the thousands of hits.

You just have to outsmart the pie,
BDL

 

Follow BDL's directions as I would tell you same procedure. And yes being you are adding flour there may be some precooking involved.:chef: