Line a nine-inch pie plate with the pastry. By all means build a rim with the pastry and flute it. This is essential for the amount of custard indicated in this recipe.
Cover the bottom of the pastry with a round of parchment paper and add enough dried beans or peas to partly fill the shell. Bake 10 minutes.
Reduce the oven heat to 375 degrees. Remove and discard the beans and parchment paper and set the pastry-lined pie plate aside.
Cook the bacon until crisp and remove it from skillet. Pour off all but one tablespoon of the fat remaining in the skillet. Cook the onion in the remaining fat until the onion is transparent.
Crumble the bacon and sprinkle the bacon, onion and cheeses over the inside of the partly baked pastry.
Combine the eggs, cream, nutmeg, salt, pepper and Tabasco sauce to taste. Strain the mixture over the onion-cheese mixture. Slide the pie onto a baking sheet.
Bake the pie until a knife inserted one inch from the pastry edge comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Remove to a wire rack. Let stand five or 10 minutes before serving.
Notes
Quiche Lorraine comes from the Lorraine region of France. Alsace and Lorraine hug the border between France and Germany, so that Alsace and Lorraine are both French and German and are also their own unique place. The most famous dish from Lorraine is quiche. And the specialty quiche from Lorraine features gruyere cheese, onion, fatty bacon (French lardons) and nutmeg as its primary flavours.The history of quiche, a dish we think of as quintessentially French, is actually a liminal one, in that the dish is of German origin. The word 'quiche' comes from the German word kuchen, meaning cake. Thus quiche is a savoury cake, and Lorraine is a rather new name for a region that, under Germanic rule, was called the Kingdom of Lothringen. There are 13th century recipes for egg and cream baked in a dough crust in Italy, so it is difficult to say exactly where such a simple approach to baking first began. In the 14th century English recipe collection, The Forme of Cury, there is a recipe like this with the unappetising name 'Crustardes of flesh'.The oldest recipes for quiche Lorraine were simply an open-faced pie (that is, crust on the bottom and sides only), filled with a mixture of egg and cream and chopped bacon. The dough was simply bread dough, but in the 20th century this evolved into the more sophisticated pastry crust we are familiar with today.