The regional table / Massachusetts
Boston Cream Pie
It is a cake. Every book that prints it says so by where it puts it: Fannie Farmer files this in the cake chapter, on page 421, and keeps a completely different Cream Pie of three baked pastry crusts back on page 391.
The document is The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Merritt Farmer, 1896, and what it prints is worth reading slowly. Page 421, in the cake chapter, carries Cream Pie I: half a cup of butter, a cup of sugar, two eggs, half a cup of milk, one and three-quarter cups of flour and two and a half teaspoons of baking powder, mixed as her One Egg Cake, baked in round layer cake pans, with Cream Filling between the layers and the top sprinkled with powdered sugar. Directly under it sits Washington Pie — the same cake, raspberry jam or jelly instead of the cream, powdered sugar again. Overleaf on page 422 is Chocolate Pie, the same cake once more, split and spread between and on top with Chocolate Frosting. So the chocolate-covered version is in the book, under a different name, in a different recipe. There is no glaze on the cream one, and the phrase Boston cream pie does not appear anywhere in the 1896 edition, not in the recipes and not in the index. Mrs Lincoln does not use it either: her Boston Cook Book of 1884 has Sponge Cake for Cream Pies on page 375, baked in round shallow pans, split and filled with a cooked cream, and nothing on top of it at all.
The reason it is called a pie is the pan, and the pan can be chased through the books rather than asserted. Mrs Cornelius, The Young Housekeeper's Friend, Boston, has it first: her 1846 edition has no such recipe, but the revised and enlarged edition of 1859 prints, on page 53 of the cake chapter, Jelly-Cake, or Washington Pie — cup cake batter spread on round shallow tins, three tablespoons to a tin, baked ten or fifteen minutes, jam between the sheets. By 1860 the tin has the name on it: a White Mountain cake recipe in The Southern Field and Fireside that January says to bake in jelly-cake or Washington pie tins, four in number. By 1884 Mrs Lincoln bakes a corn cake in two Washington pie tins and a Harlequin cake in a Washington pie plate, and her cooking-school examination questions ask pupils to state the difference between Washington, jelly-cake, squash and mince pie plates — four distinct rounds of tinware in one Boston kitchen. Farmer herself still uses the word as a pan in 1896: her first strawberry shortcake is baked in buttered Washington pie or round layer cake tins. A recipe syndicated through the Georgia papers in November 1890 gives the instruction in the plainest form anyone has put it — Boston Cream Pie, a plain batter, and then: bake in two large pie tins, split open the cakes with a sharp knife and fill with cream. The name is a pan, the pan outlived the reason, and the Cleveland Courier of 4 October 1929, printing a recipe it credits to the federal Bureau of Home Economics, had already given up and headlined it Boston Cream Pie Is Cake — misleading in its name, for it is not a pie at all. The commonwealth is widely said to have made this the official state dessert by statute; malegislature.gov refused every connection on 22 September 2026 and the law-publishing mirrors answered 403, so this article does not rest on that and neither should you.
Why this version works
The pan is the recipe. A nine-inch pie tin is shallower and wider than a nine-inch cake pan, so the same batter bakes thinner, faster and with a higher proportion of browned surface. That is the texture the old recipes assume: two thin sheets rather than two deep layers, split apart by a band of cream about as thick as either of them. Bake this batter in deep pans and you get a filled layer cake, which is a good thing but is not this.
Butter cake, not sponge, and the books offer you both. Lincoln fills a sponge; Farmer fills a butter cake made as her One Egg Cake. The butter cake is the better host. Sponge is dry enough to drink the filling, and a day later the line between cake and cream has blurred; a butter crumb holds its edge, and the cream stays a layer you can see.
Powdered sugar, because that is what the documents print. Cornelius 1859, the 1871 Georgia printing of Washington Pie with a cream for it, the 1890 syndicated recipe, Lincoln 1884, Farmer 1896 and the 1929 Bureau of Home Economics version all finish with sugar or with nothing. Not one of them pours chocolate over a cream pie. The glaze is a real and now dominant finish and this recipe gives it to you as an option, but it is later than everything above and none of these books will tell you when it arrived.
Fifteen minutes in a double boiler, and flour rather than cornstarch. Farmer's Cream Filling is seven-eighths of a cup of sugar, a third of a cup of flour, an eighth of a teaspoon of salt, two eggs and two cups of scalded milk, cooked fifteen minutes over water. That is long, and the length is the point: flour-thickened custard tastes raw and chalky until the starch is fully cooked out, and a quarter of an hour of gentle heat both cooks it and pasteurises the eggs so the filling sets firm instead of weeping into the crumb.
