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Good Lemon Pie
Take one lemon, one cup of water, one cup of brown sugar, two tablespoonfuls of flour, five eggs, three tablespoonfuls of white sugar. Grate the rind of the lemon; squeeze out the juice, put all together and add the water, brown sugar and flour, working the mass into a smooth paste.
Beat the eggs and mix with the paste, saving the whites of three of them.
Make two pies, baking without top
A lemon custard pie of the plainest sort, thickened with flour and eggs rather than cornstarch, with the reserved whites clearly meant for a meringue. The instructions stop abruptly, so a few gaps need filling.
- The hinge: temper the eggsThe recipe says to mix beaten eggs into the paste, but if the paste has been warmed at all, add it to the eggs a spoonful at a time first. Eggs dropped into hot liquid scramble, and a curdled filling will never bake smooth.
- The reserved whites are a meringueThree whites and the three tablespoons of white sugar are listed but never used in the text. Beat them to soft peaks, add the sugar gradually, spread over the baked filling so it touches the crust all round, and return to the oven until browned.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. For a custard filling in an unbaked shell, modern practice is about 400F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then 325-350F until the centre barely jiggles; brown the meringue at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes.
- Bake the shell blind if you prefer"Baking without top" means a single-crust pie, not a pre-baked shell. A wet flour-thickened filling will soften the base; 10 minutes of blind baking with weights avoids that.
- Yield is optimisticOne cup of water and one lemon will not fill two modern 9-inch tins. Treat this as one 8- or 9-inch pie, or two smaller, shallower tins.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar was generally less refined than today's light brown. Use light brown, packed, and expect a slightly darker, more molasses-inflected filling than a standard lemon pie.
- Flour as thickenerTwo tablespoons is a modest amount of starch, though the five eggs do much of the setting. The recipe mixes the paste raw; if you prefer, cook the water, sugar and flour together until smooth and thickened before the eggs go in, to avoid any raw-flour taste.
- Zest before juicingGrate the rind first, as written, and take only the yellow. The white pith is bitter and there is nothing else in this filling to hide it.
Lemon pie belongs to a family of American custard pies that expanded rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century, as cheap refined sugar and citrus shipments — from the Mediterranean, and later in the century from Florida and California — made lemons a year-round grocery rather than a luxury. The construction here — a starch-and-egg filling baked in a bottom crust, with the surplus whites whipped into meringue so nothing is wasted — reflects the sort of thrifty logic often found in the pastry chapters of books of this period. Household manuals of the era not uncommonly print several lemon pies together, differing chiefly in whether they use flour or cornstarch, brown sugar or white, and whether the whites go into the filling or on top; this version splits the eggs and uses brown sugar, which gives a mellower, less sharp pie than the bright yellow lemon meringue that became standard later in the twentieth century.