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Lemon Pie (Four eggs one and a half cups)
Four eggs, one and a half cups sugar, two-thirds cups water, two table-spoons flour, one lemon. Beat the yolks of eggs until very smooth (beat the yolks a long time and whip the whites well), add the grated peel of lemon and the sugar, beat well, stir in the flour, and add the lemon juice (if lemons are small two may be necessary), and lastly the water; stir well, and pour in pie-pans lined with paste. When baked, take from oven, and spread over them the whites of the eggs beaten dry and smooth with four table-spoons pulverized sugar; return to oven and brown slightly. The above recipe is for two pies. -Mrs. Virginia C. Meredith.
A very lean lemon custard thickened with flour rather than cornstarch, baked in an unbaked shell and meringued afterward. The proportions make two shallow pies of the sort common in 1877, or one deep 9-inch pie.
- Oven temperatureThe original assumes a cook who reads her own oven. Start hot, around 425F, for the first 10 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 350F and bake until the filling barely jiggles at the center, roughly 25 to 30 minutes more.
- Browning the meringueThe original asks only that it 'brown slightly.' A moderate oven, around 350F, colours it more evenly than a hot one; very high heat can tan the peaks before the meringue underneath has set, which is one of the things blamed for sliding and weeping.
- Spread it hotThe instruction to top the pie as soon as it leaves the oven is the hinge. Meringue spread on a warm filling cooks from below and seals to the edge of the crust; on a cold filling it shrinks and pools.
- Pulverized sugarSuperfine (caster) sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Granulated will work but dissolve it fully in the whites or the meringue will bead syrup.
- Flour as thickenerTwo tablespoons of flour across two pies is a light hand; most of the set comes from the four eggs, so expect a soft custard rather than a firm, sharply sliceable one.
- The lemonZest only the yellow, no white pith. One lemon shared between two pies is very little juice by modern standards, roughly a tablespoon and a half per pie, which is why the recipe allows a second lemon if they are small; taste before pouring, since modern supermarket lemons vary widely.
- The crustRaw pastry under a wet custard goes soft. Blind bake the shell at 400F until dry and pale before filling if a crisp bottom matters to you.
- YieldTwo pies; the recipe does not say what size. Serve the same day, as flour-set custards weep by the second day and the meringue collapses.
Virginia Claypool Meredith was a real and considerable figure rather than a decorative attribution: an Indiana stock farmer and agricultural writer of the later nineteenth century, later a trustee of Purdue University, and often called the "Queen of American Agriculture" in the farm press of her day. Her appearance in Buckeye Cookery is typical of how the book was assembled, by gathering signed contributions from Midwestern women whose names carried weight locally. The pie itself belongs to a moment when lemons had become cheap and reliable enough in inland American towns for a household to build a whole dessert on one piece of fruit. Meringue-topped lemon pies spread quickly through American community cookbooks in the 1870s and 1880s, and the thickening with a spoonful or two of flour marks this as an earlier version than the cornstarch-set lemon meringue that later became standard.