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Lemon Pie without Lemon
Take one-half a teaspoonful of tartaric acid dissolved in half a cupful of cold water, half a teaspoonful of extract of lemon, one of sugar, yolk of egg, one soda cracker. After dissolving the acid stir the yolk and sugar together, and mix with the acid and water, then the extract, then cracker crumbled in. Bake in crust as for custard pie, and cover with the white of an egg and brown. Many prefer this to pie made with the lemon. Raisin Pie. Take one pound of raisins, turn over them one quart of boiling water and boil one hour. Keep adding water, so there will be a quart when done. Grate the rind of one lemon into one cup of sugar, three spoonfuls of flour and one egg. Mix well together. Turn the raisins over the mixture, stirring the while. This makes three pies.
Two recipes run together here: a mock lemon pie thickened with a cracker, and a raisin pie whose ingredient list is given in the loose shorthand of 1900. Both need a little decoding before they work.
- "One of sugar"The original drops the unit. The nearest preceding measure is "half a teaspoonful," which would read as one teaspoonful, but that is far too little for a pie, so a cupful is the likelier intention. It is genuinely ambiguous, so taste the filling before it goes into the shell.
- Tartaric acidStill sold, usually in the baking or winemaking aisle, and it is the whole point of the recipe -- it supplies the sourness that no amount of lemon extract can. Cream of tartar is not the same thing and is much weaker; citric acid is the nearest common stand-in.
- The soda crackerA single plain soda cracker (a saltine), finely crumbled, is all the starch in the filling. It gives a soft, slightly grainy set rather than the firm slice of a cornstarch pie. A second cracker would give a firmer set if that matters to you.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. "As for custard pie" implies a moderate, steady oven, for which around 350F is the usual modern equivalent. Bake until the centre is just set and barely trembles; higher heat curdles the egg and weeps liquid into the pastry.
- The meringueThe original says only to cover with the white of an egg and brown it. The usual treatment is one white beaten stiff with a spoonful of sugar, spread to the crust edge so it seals, then browned in a moderate oven until coloured. Spreading it onto the still-warm filling helps it stay put instead of shrinking away.
- YieldThe lemon filling is enough for one thinly filled pie; the original gives no tin size or number of servings. The raisin recipe explicitly makes three.
- Raisin pie measures"Three spoonfuls of flour" most likely means tablespoons, though the original does not say. Note the method: the raisins and their quart of hot cooking liquid are poured over the sugar-flour-egg mixture while stirring, which cooks the egg gently rather than scrambling it -- keep stirring throughout.
- Raisin pie assemblyThe original never says to bake it, or even to use a crust, but the filling is loose and needs a shell and a top or lattice; bake in a hot oven until the pastry colours and the filling bubbles. Divided among three pies the filling is shallow.
"Without lemon" recipes belong to a whole family of make-do pies -- vinegar pie, mock apple pie, mock cherry pie -- that appeared in American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth. Fresh citrus was shipped, and could be costly and seasonal away from the ports and the rail lines, while tartaric acid and bottled lemon extract kept well on a pantry shelf and cost very little. The trick is a sound one: tartness and aroma are separate sensations, so an acid plus a flavouring extract reads convincingly as lemon, and the compiler's claim that "many prefer this" is not merely defensive. The crumbled soda cracker doing duty as thickener is the same instinct that produced cracker mock apple pie, which was already in print by the mid-nineteenth century, and the raisin pie printed immediately after belongs to the same economy -- dried fruit and a grated rind stretched across three pies.