Hi Francine! This happened to me too - I think the water just releases from the egg and other ingredients in the pie as it cooks. Here is my solution: keep a bag of sugar cookies in the freezer. When you make your pie, grind some of the cookies in the blender till they are very fine crumbs (you will need about 1/2 cup crumbs.) Before you pour in the custard, spread the crumbs over the bottom of the pie crust so that you have at least 1/8 inch of cookie crumbs covering the bottom crust. You should not be able to see the bottom crust when you are done. Grind more crumbs if you need to. You may want to pat the crumb layer down very gently to make sure it stays put.Then put your custard batter over it very gently - use a spoon and go slowly to cover the crumbs. Once you have covered the crumbs very well, slowly add the rest of the batter in a slow drizzle till it is all in the pan. Then go ahead and bake as usual.
You can use different kinds of cookies for different kinds of pies, (chocolate wafers for chocolate pie, lemon wafers in a lemon cream pie, and so on. use your imagination - just stick to wafer type cookies, not ones with cream in them or any kind of melty chip) and you can even do this with fruit pies like apple and so on to keep them from having soggy bottom crusts.(I use the pecan sandies a lot for this!)
Hope this helps!
nutmeg
