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Orange Pie
Line pie tin with Crisco pastry. Beat yolks of 3 eggs with 1 cup sugar till light; add 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 2/3 cup milk, grated rind and strained juice of 1 orange. Place in double boiler and stir till it thickens, then pour on to crust and bake 30 minutes. Cover top with meringue made with whites of eggs and sweetened with 3 tablespoons sugar and flavored with 1 teaspoon orange extract. Place in oven to brown.
A single-crust orange custard pie with a stovetop-thickened filling. The original assumes you know the oven temperatures and the crust handling, so here are the gaps.
- The hinge: blind-bake the shellThe hinge: consider blind-baking the shell -- The filling is already thickened when it goes in, so the pastry beneath it can come out pale and soft in 30 minutes. If you want a crisp base, line and blind-bake the shell at about 400F for roughly 15 minutes before filling; the original, though, assumes the filling goes into a raw crust.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Bake the filled pie at 350F. For the meringue, either 350F for 12-15 minutes or a brief 425F for 4-5 minutes if you want a darker top faster.
- Crisco pastryCrisco is still sold and still works here, though it has been reformulated since this period to cut trans fat, so it is not quite the shortening Neil knew. Any all-shortening or half-butter pastry for an 8- or 9-inch shell substitutes directly.
- Baking time is generousThirty minutes at 350F is more than a pre-cooked cornstarch custard needs. Once the center barely jiggles as a single mass — usually 20-25 minutes — take it out, or the eggs will weep.
- "Whites of eggs"The recipe means the three whites left from the yolks. Three tablespoons sugar is on the lean side; beat to soft peaks first, then add the sugar a spoonful at a time.
- Orange rind and juiceOne orange gives roughly 1/3 cup juice and a tablespoon of zest. Grate the zest before juicing, and add the juice off the heat if you can — prolonged heating with acid slackens cornstarch.
- Sealing the meringueSpread the meringue so it touches the pastry rim all the way round. That is what stops it shrinking into a dome and sliding.
- YieldOne pie; the quantities suit an 8- or 9-inch tin, giving six to eight slices. Cool completely before cutting; the filling sets as it cools.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished after 1911: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco, an all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, was unfamiliar to kitchens that had cooked with lard and butter, and Procter & Gamble commissioned recipe books in which the brand name is woven into the recipe itself, as it is here in "Crisco pastry." The pie itself is a straightforward member of the citrus-custard family that also produced lemon meringue pie. The orange extract in the meringue is worth noticing: commercial flavoring extracts were cheap and heavily advertised by this date, and recipe writers used them freely to reinforce a flavor that fresh fruit alone gave only faintly after baking.