Orange Pie
Grated rind and juice of two oranges, four eggs, four table-spoons sugar, and one of butter; cream the butter and sugar, add the beaten eggs, then the rind and juice of the oranges, and, lastly, the whites beaten to a froth, and mixed in lightly. Bake with an under crust.-Gov. Stearns, Florida.
A single-crust orange custard pie of the plainest sort — no flour, no milk, just eggs, sugar, butter and citrus. It sets by egg alone, so the baking is the whole trick.
- The egg ambiguity"Four eggs" followed by "lastly, the whites beaten to a froth" means four yolks in the body of the filling and the four whites folded in at the end. Read it as one set of eggs separated, not eight eggs.
- Sugar is startlingly lowFour tablespoons is about 1/4 cup for a full pie — sharp and eggy by modern taste, closer to a savoury-edged curd. Taste the filling before it goes in and adjust if you want dessert rather than an oddity.
- "Bake with an under crust"Bottom crust only, no top, no lattice. Blind-bake the shell partly first: this filling is wet and there is nothing to absorb it, so an unbaked base goes soggy.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature. A moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 30 to 40 minutes suits it; custard baked hot will curdle and weep.
- Judging donenessThe centre should still wobble slightly when the pan is nudged; it firms as it cools. A knife inserted at the halfway point between rim and centre comes out clean. Overbaked, it cracks and turns watery.
- ZestGrate only the coloured outer layer of the peel; a coarse grater takes pith with it, and that bitterness will read as a fault today.
- YieldEnough for one modest single-crust pie, six to eight slices, though the filling is thin for a full 9-inch shell. Being an egg custard, it wants refrigeration once cool and is best eaten within two days.
Buckeye Cookery (the 1877 Minneapolis edition of a book that began the previous year as a collection by the ladies of the First Congregational Church, Marysville, Ohio) carries a number of contributions credited to governors, senators and their wives — a familiar tactic for church and charity cookbooks of the decade, since a famous name sold copies. The "Gov. Stearns, Florida" credit points to Marcellus L. Stearns, Republican governor of Florida from 1874 to 1877, and the recipe is a fair advertisement for his state: Florida's citrus groves along the St. Johns River were shipping fruit north by the 1870s. The dish itself belongs to the old family of single-crust curd and "transparent" pies — lemon, orange, vinegar, buttermilk — in which beaten eggs do all the thickening, with no cornstarch and no milk to soften the result.