The contradictory brilliance of Boston cream pie

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but perhaps you can teach it old tricks. When I embarked on making a Boston cream pie, I thought I knew it all when it came to sponge cakes. I’d creamed butter and sugar, using elbow grease and a wooden spoon or employing the horsepower of a stand mixer’s whisk attachment. I’ve used the all-in-one-method; I’ve melted butter and folded it into cake batters in the pursuit of sticky denseness. And I’ve folded in egg whites, holding my breath in an attempt not to knock any air out of the mix.

But I had never made a Boston cream pie, and so I had never made a hot milk sponge. Could this old dog learn something new?

The first thing to say about Boston cream pie is that it is neither a pie and nor is it filled with cream. It is, definitively, a cake, made up of two vanilla sponges, with a thick custard filling, and then covered in a glossy chocolate ganache that drips down the sides. When the cake was first made in the 19th century, the same baking tins would be used interchangeably for pies and cakes, and therefore the names of the puddings would too. When it came to Boston cream pie, the pie moniker stuck.

There is at least some geographical plausibility in the name. The Parker House hotel, a long-established hotel in Boston, takes credit for its invention, dating it to 1856. The hotel certainly has heritage: it gave the US its beloved Parker House rolls, the soft, buttery dinner rolls traditionally served at Thanksgiving, and counted both Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X among its staff at various points (Ho Chi Minh worked there as a pastry chef – did he ever make the Boston cream pie?).