Lemon Pie
3/4 cup sugar. 1 cup boiling water. 2 tablespoons cornstarch. 2 egg yolks slightly beaten. 4 tablespoons lemon juice.
Grated rind one lemon. 1 teaspoon butter. 2 tablespoons flour.
Few grains salt.
PROCESS: Mix sugar, cornstarch, flour and salt, add boiling water gradually, stirring constantly. Cook over hot water until mixture thickens; continue stirring. Add lemon juice, rind, butter, and egg yolks. Line a pie pan with Rich Paste, wet edges, and lay around a rim of pastry one inch wide; flute edge. Cool mixture and turn in lined pan. Bake in a moderate oven until crust is well browned. Remove from oven, cool slightly, spread with meringue, return to oven to bake and brown meringue.
Whites 2 eggs.
A double-thickened lemon filling — cornstarch and flour together — baked briefly in a pastry shell and finished with meringue. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, which is the first thing to sort out.
- Missing quantitiesThe sugar and the boiling water are called for in the method but their amounts are absent from the list, and the original gives no clue. For a 9-inch pie of this type the usual proportions are about a cup of sugar to a cup of boiling water; treat that as a reconstruction, not the author's figure.
- Over hot water"Cook over hot water" means a double boiler, not direct heat. With both cornstarch and flour the paste is thick and needs constant stirring to stay smooth; give it a good five to eight minutes of steady stirring after it thickens so the flour loses its raw taste.
- The yolksThe yolks go in after the lemon juice, once the mixture has thickened; the original does not say whether the pan is off the heat. It also adds them straight in, but stirring a few spoonfuls of the hot starch mixture into them first, then returning the lot to the pan, guards against their setting into threads.
- Acid and starchThe lemon juice is added at the end for a reason. Boiling acid with cornstarch breaks the starch down and the filling loosens as it stands.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375 he filthe filling goes in cold, so it needs 30 to 40 minutes for the pastry to brown through -- check the underside of the rim rather than the top.
- The pastry rimThe strip of paste laid around the wetted edge builds a raised wall an inch wide, which both holds the filling and gives something to flute. Chill the assembled shell before filling or the rim slumps.
- MeringueTwo whites will take about four tablespoons of sugar, beaten in a spoonful at a time to firm peaks. Spread it while the filling is still warm and seal it right to the pastry, which helps keep it from shrinking away from the edge. Brown at about 350
- YieldThe original gives no pan size; the quantities suit one 8- or 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Cut it the day it is made; the crust softens overnight.
Lemon pie thickened with cornstarch belongs to the late nineteenth century, when boxed cornstarch became a cheap kitchen staple and cooks stopped relying on eggs alone to set a custard filling — the older English lemon puddings used many more yolks and no starch at all. The meringue lid, which a much-repeated tradition credits to Philadelphia cookery of the 1840s and the pastry teacher Elizabeth Goodfellow — though meringue-topped tarts are older, and the attribution reaches us only second-hand through her pupils — gave the two spare whites somewhere to go, which is exactly the economy this recipe assumes when it lists them almost as an afterthought.