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Lemon Pie (One large lemon two eggs one)
One large lemon, two eggs, one cup of sugar, one heaping tablespoon flour, one cup of boiling water. Beat the yolks of eggs and sugar together until light, then add lemon juice and a little grated rind; next add flour; beat a little more; next add boiling water, gradually, beating all the time. Have whites of eggs beaten to a froth and add last. Bake in slow oven for three-quarters of an hour. Bottom crust only.
— Mrs. Louis Richardson
This is a lemon sponge pie — a thin custard lightened with beaten whites, which separates as it bakes into a soft cake layer over lemon curd. The low oven is not optional.
- Slow ovenBake at 300–325F. Anything hotter sets the egg too fast, and the filling curdles or puffs and collapses instead of forming its two layers.
- The hinge: add the boiling water slowlyPour it into the yolk-sugar-flour mixture in a thin stream while beating hard. Dumped in at once it scrambles the yolks, and no amount of later beating will smooth them out.
- One large lemonReckon on about 3 tablespoons of juice and a teaspoon of zest. Modern supermarket lemons vary widely; taste the mixture before it goes in the shell and adjust with a little more juice if it is flat. Grate only the yellow, not the white pith.
- One heaping tablespoon flourRoughly 1 1/2 level tablespoons. That is a deliberately light hand — this filling is meant to be spoonable and quivering, not sliceable like a cornstarch lemon pie.
- Bottom crust onlyThis means a single crust, no top. The recipe gives no pre-baking step; if you want to avoid a pale, damp base under the wet batter and long slow bake, you can partially blind-bake the shell first, though that is a modern addition rather than part of the instructions.
- WhitesBeaten "to a froth" means soft and foamy, not stiff peaks. The recipe has them added last; fold them in gently rather than beating them in, or you knock out the air and lose the sponge layer.
- DonenessThree-quarters of an hour is about right for a 9-inch pie, but judge by the top: it should be set and lightly browned, with the center barely trembling. It firms further as it cools.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Serve at room temperature or chilled; warm, the two layers have not yet settled.
Lemon sponge pie, sometimes called lemon cake pie, was one of the standard uses for a single lemon in a household that had no fresh fruit for most of the year. The construction is thrifty in a way that shows the period: two eggs, a cup of sugar and a spoon of flour stretched with boiling water to fill a whole pie, and a single crust, plausibly to save shortening. Community cookbooks like this one were often assembled by a church society or village improvement association, each contribution signed with the donor's married name, so that "Mrs. Louis Richardson" was both a credit and an endorsement among neighbors who knew whose pie was worth copying. By the late nineteenth century lemons reached even small villages fairly reliably by rail and were cheap enough for everyday baking rather than reserved for illness, which is why they turn up so often in these pages.