Lemon Pie
The yolks of three eggs, half tablespoon butter, one tablespoon flour, grate half the peel of one lemon, the juice of one lemon, one cup sugar, two-thirds of a cup of sweet milk. Mix the above and bake on a pie plate lined with a rich crust; beat the whites of three eggs and add three small tablespoonfuls of white sugar; after the pie is baked spread the frosting on and place in the oven to brown.
A single-crust custard lemon pie of the plainer sort — thickened with a spoonful of flour rather than cornstarch, and given a soft meringue at the end. The original assumes you know your own oven, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh, unsoured whole milk, specified because sour milk and buttermilk were equally common in the pantry. Whole milk is the right substitute; skim gives a thin, watery custard.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Start the pie at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F and bake until the filling is set at the edges and only faintly wobbly in the centre, roughly 25 to 30 minutes more.
- The crustA "rich crust" means a short pastry with a high proportion of butter or lard. Because the filling is loose when it goes in, partially blind-baking the shell — 12 minutes at 400F with weights — is the surest guard against a soggy base.
- Mixing order"Mix the above" leaves the sequence to you. Cream the butter with the sugar and flour first, then beat in the yolks, then the zest, juice and milk last, so the flour is evenly dispersed before any liquid goes in and does not lump.
- Grating the peelHalf a lemon's worth of zest, about a teaspoon and a half. Take only the yellow; the white pith beneath is bitter and there is nothing in this filling to mask it.
- The meringueThree whites to three tablespoons of sugar is a very soft meringue by modern standards — closer to a foam than the stiff pile most people expect. Beat to soft peaks, add the sugar gradually, and spread it so it touches the crust all round, which stops it shrinking away as it cools.
- BrowningReturn the pie to a 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes, until the peaks are tan. A hotter oven browns the surface in a few minutes but leaves the meringue underneath wet, and it will weep as the pie sits.
- YieldEnough for one 8- or 9-inch pie, which cuts into six or eight. Cool at room temperature before slicing; a warm flour-thickened custard will run.
Lemon pies of this kind — yolks, sugar, juice and a little flour or cracker crumb, crowned with the leftover whites — appear widely in American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century. The construction is thrifty: three yolks go into the filling and three whites onto the top of the same pie. The flour thickener marks this as an older or plainer version; cornstarch, which gives the glassier, firmer filling most people now associate with lemon meringue pie, became the more usual thickener in later recipes. The instruction to use "sweet milk" distinguishes fresh milk from the sour milk and buttermilk also kept in the kitchen.