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Lemon Pie (Three lemons pare yellow off)
Three lemons; pare yellow off very thin, cut up fine, put on stove in pint of water and boil down half; strain; take every bit of white off and shred the lemon, add one-half cup of molasses, one and one-half cups sugar, three tablespoons of flour; stir all together and cook. This will make one pie with crust, bottom and crust or strips on top.
— Miss Leah Timmerman
A stovetop lemon filling with no eggs and no butter, thickened with flour and darkened with molasses. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to line a pie plate and judge a hot oven, so the gaps are worth filling in.
- The hinge: cook the filling until it thickensThree tablespoons of flour need to be brought to a full simmer and held there a minute or two, whisking, or the pie will taste pasty and run when cut. Add the flour to the sugar and molasses first and stir it into the warm lemon liquid gradually to avoid lumps.
- Reading "pare yellow off very thin"This is zest only, no white pith. Boiling a pint of water down to half means you finish with about one cup of intensely lemon-scented liquid, which is the base of the filling. Strain the zest out and discard it.
- "Take every bit of white off and shred the lemon"After zesting, cut away all the pith and membrane from the three lemons and chop or shred the flesh, pips removed. Those shreds go into the filling and give the pie its texture; this is a shred pie, not a smooth curd.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will swamp the lemon. Molasses was generally the cheaper sweetener of the two in this period, which may be part of why it appears alongside the sugar here; it also gives the filling its brown cast.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the book offers no oven term to translate. Since the filling is already cooked, you are baking only the crust: a hot oven to set and brown the bottom pastry, then moderate until the top is golden, watching it rather than timing it, will do. Roughly 425F followed by 350F is a reasonable modern starting point.
- Pan size and yieldThe recipe says only "one pie." An 8- or 9-inch plate is the usual size for the period, and this quantity of filling suits a shallow plate rather than a deep dish.
- CoolingA flour-thickened filling needs to cool fully, at least three hours, before slicing. Cut warm and it will slump.
Lemon pies built on shredded whole lemon rather than eggs and butter appear in nineteenth-century American community cookbooks, and the type has a relative in the Shaker lemon pies made with sliced whole fruit. The molasses is telling: molasses was generally the cheaper everyday sweetener and white sugar the more expensive one, so a mix of the two would have stretched a household's outlay while the lemons were the bought luxury. Contributed recipes like Miss Timmerman's were the substance of church and society cookbooks, printed largely as submitted, which is why the flour goes in without ceremony and the oven is never mentioned at all.