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Lemon Meringue Pie
1 1/2 Cupfuls Sugar. 1½ Cupfuls Boiling Water 5 Tablespoonfuls Cornstarch 1/3 Teaspoonful Salt 1 Tablespoonful Snowdrift 2 Eggs 5 Tablespoonfuls Lemon Juice Grated Rind Threefourths Lemon Pastry Thoroughly mix together the cornstarch, salt and sugar, and add to the boiling water, stirring constantly. When thick, transfer to a double-boiler and cook for at least ten minutes. Add the Snowdrift. and slowly stir this into the egg yolks, slightly beaten. Then add the lemon juice and rind. In the meantime, the pastry should have been prepared and baked on an inverted pie-plate. When this crust is almost brown enough, it should be put in the pie-plate, the cooled filling poured in and the whole covered with a meringue made by beating the egg whites stiff, adding a few drops of lemon extract or juice, and two tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar. Bake in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F., about ten minutes. longer.
A workable cornstarch lemon filling, though the printed ingredient list has clearly lost a line or two in typesetting and needs reconstructing before you start.
- Missing sugarThe method says to mix the cornstarch, salt and sugar, but no sugar appears in the ingredient list. For a filling of this size, roughly 1 cup granulated sugar is the standard proportion; the original gives no figure, so treat it as an omission rather than a measurement.
- The water quantity"1/2 Cupfuls Boiling Water" is almost certainly a broken "1 1/2 Cupfuls." Half a cup of water against 5 tablespoons of cornstarch would set into paste, not a pourable filling.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening sold in cans, from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, which also produced Wesson oil. One tablespoon of any neutral vegetable shortening, or butter, does the same job here — it adds gloss and softens the set.
- Tempering the yolksThe hinge of the recipe. Add the hot starch mixture to the slightly beaten yolks slowly and off the heat, whisking, or the yolks scramble and the filling turns granular. Returning it briefly to the double boiler after the yolks go in helps it thicken further.
- Lemon juice lastAcid weakens cornstarch, which is why the juice and rind go in only after the starch has cooked its full ten minutes. Adding lemon at the start gives a filling that thins as it stands.
- Baking the shell invertedRolling the pastry over the outside of an upturned pie plate was the pre-pie-weight method of blind baking: the crust cannot slump into the dish. Lift it off while still warm and flexible, then settle it into the right-side-up plate, as directed. Modern practice — lining the plate and weighting the pastry with beans or pie weights at 400F — is easier and gives the same result.
- Filling temperaturePour the filling in cooled, as written, but keep it just warm rather than refrigerator-cold if you want the meringue to seal to it. A cold filling under a hot meringue is one common cause of weeping.
- Meringue proportionsTwo tablespoons of powdered sugar for two whites is a lean, old-fashioned meringue that browns fast and holds less air. Two tablespoons of sugar per white gives a more stable topping. Ten minutes at 350F is right for colour; watch it from eight.
- YieldThe original gives no pan size; the quantities suit roughly a 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Cut with a wet knife and serve the day it is made.
This comes from a promotional cookbook for Snowdrift, a canned cottonseed-oil shortening marketed in the United States from the early twentieth century by the Southern Cotton Oil Company. Books of this kind were given away or sold cheaply to teach cooks to use the new industrial fats in place of lard and butter, which is why a single tablespoon of Snowdrift is written into a filling that hardly needs shortening at all. Lemon meringue pie itself is generally traced to nineteenth-century lemon puddings and custards, and the cornstarch-thickened version became the American standard, a shift often attributed to the availability of cheap boxed cornstarch and a filling that set reliably without a heavy load of eggs. The instruction to bake the shell on an inverted pie plate is a good marker of the period, predating the widespread use of pie weights.