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Orange Pie
Beat the yolks of three eggs with a cup of sugar, and when light add one teaspoon of butter; stir in pulp and juice of two oranges and the grated rind of one-half one; add one cup of milk. Bake in a deep dish lined with pastry. When done cover with meringue, using the whites of three eggs beaten with three tablespoons of sugar. Brown lightly. Serve cold.
— Mrs. Edward Overbaugh
A single-crust custard pie in the old style: no thickener, no blind bake, and no temperature given. The custard sets by egg alone, so the oven has to be gentle.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, and the method only implies a gentle oven. For a custard pie of this kind a short hot start (around 425F for 10-12 minutes) to set the crust, then 325F for a further 30-40 minutes until the centre barely trembles, is a reasonable modern reading; the hot start is unnecessary if you blind bake as suggested below. Too hot an oven risks the citrus custard curdling and weeping.
- The hinge: acid plus milkOrange juice may visibly curdle the milk as you combine them. Whisk the juice in last, work quickly, and pour into the shell straight away; the appearance generally evens out as the eggs set.
- Blind bake the shellA wet custard in raw pastry can give a soggy base. Line a 9-inch deep dish, chill it, then blind bake at about 400F for 15 minutes before filling. This is an addition; the original simply says to bake in a deep dish lined with pastry.
- "Pulp and juice of two oranges"Two ordinary navel oranges give roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup juice with the membranes and pith removed. Taste, and cut the sugar if the filling seems cloying. Grated rind means zest only, no white pith.
- One teaspoon of butterSmall quantities like this are common in period receipts; the butter is there for richness and mouthfeel, not structure. Beat it in once the yolks and sugar are light, as written.
- MeringueThree whites with only three tablespoons of sugar is a soft, lean meringue. Beat to firm peaks, spread so it touches the crust all round to stop shrinkage, and brown at 350F for 12-15 minutes rather than under a broiler, which sets the surface while the base stays raw and beads liquid.
- Serving and keepingServes 6 to 8. "Serve cold" means fully cooled so the custard firms enough to slice; because it is egg and dairy, refrigerate it and eat it within two days. Meringue-topped custard pies do not keep well beyond that.
Orange pies belong to the large family of American custard pies that flourished once cheap cane sugar and rail-shipped citrus reached northern towns in the later nineteenth century. Florida and California oranges were arriving in northeastern markets by the 1880s, and a community cookbook like this one — apparently a Hudson Valley production — shows the result: a fruit that would have been a Christmas luxury a generation earlier turned into an everyday pie filling stretched with milk, sugar and eggs. The structure is identical to lemon pie of the same period, and older still to the English "lemon cheese" and custard tarts that colonial cooks brought over, differing only in the fruit and in the common Victorian habit of crowning the thing with meringue made from the leftover whites. Village receipt collections such as this were compiled and sold by church and civic groups as fundraisers, which is why each entry carries a contributor's name.