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Lemon Pie (One lemon grated one cup sugar)
One lemon grated, one cup sugar, the yolks of three eggs, small pieces butter, three table-spoons milk, two tea-spoons corn starch; beat all together and bake in a rich crust; beat the whites with three table-spoons sugar, place on the pie when done, and then brown in the oven. - Mrs. W. E. Scobey.
A small, old-style lemon custard pie: the filling bakes in the shell rather than being cooked on the stove, and the meringue goes on at the end. A few points need translating.
- "One lemon grated"Most likely the whole fruit put to use — the zest grated off and the juice squeezed in — though the wording could equally mean only the grated rind. A modern lemon gives about 3 tablespoons juice and a packed teaspoon of zest, which is all the acid this filling gets.
- A rich crustAn unbaked shell of short pastry, rolled thin. Because the filling is loose and only lightly thickened, a partially blind-baked shell (about 15 minutes at 400F, weighted) gives a far better base than raw pastry.
- Oven heatThe book assumes you know; treat it as a moderate oven, 350F, until the centre is set with only a slight wobble — roughly 30 to 40 minutes for a shallow pie. The meringue then browns at 350F in 10 to 15 minutes, or under a hot broiler in one or two if watched constantly.
- Two teaspoons corn starchThat is a light hand for a cup of sugar and three yolks. The filling sets more as a baked custard than a sliceable curd, and will be soft at the centre. Do not add more starch expecting a modern lemon meringue texture; this is a different, looser dish.
- "Small pieces butter"About a tablespoon, in flakes, is a reasonable reading. It enriches the custard rather than doing structural work.
- Meringue proportionsThree tablespoons sugar to three whites is a soft, old-fashioned meringue — it browns quickly and weeps sooner than a modern one made with two tablespoons sugar per white. Beat to firm peaks, spread so it touches the crust all around to anchor it, and eat the pie the day it is made.
- YieldProbably about one 8-inch pie; the filling is small, so the layer will be shallow. Cool at least two hours before cutting; a warm custard pie will run.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book compiled at Marysville, Ohio, in 1876, and was issued from Minneapolis; it was assembled from contributions by named women of the community, and the Pastry section carries several competing lemon pies — a sign both of how popular the dish was and of how little standardization there was. Lemon pie of this kind probably depended on two things reaching the inland Midwest: cheap refined sugar and shipped citrus, lemons keeping better in winter than the fresh fruit used for other pies. Cornstarch, commercially manufactured in the United States from the 1840s, is the modern element here; earlier lemon puddings and pies relied on eggs alone, or on bread and cracker crumbs, to hold the filling together. The two-stage method — bake the custard, crown it with sweetened whites, return it to colour — was common by the 1870s and is essentially the ancestor of the lemon meringue pie, though the name itself came into common use later.