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Ann Murdock (Cook slowly until thick)
Cook slowly until thick, stirring constantly and when done set aside to cool.
Pour into deep pie plate lined with puff paste and bake to a golden brown.
Make a meringue of the whites, beaten stiff, and to which have been added two tablespoons of powdered sugar, spread this over pie and return to oven, leaving door slightly ajar. Remove as soon as delicately browned.
This is the most heavenly lemon pie imaginable!
Best Cushes- Senceren Cum Thund alle
SMOTHERED SAUSAGES
Prick pork or veal sausages and place in casserole or covered pan. Cover with mashed potatoes; cover potatoes with an egg well beaten; cover egg with fine bread crumbs.
Bake thirty minutes over high flame.
Sincerely yours,
Two dishes sit side by side here: the tail end of a lemon meringue pie and a complete method for smothered sausages. The pie's filling quantities are absent, so treat what survives as technique notes rather than a formula.
- What survives of the pieThe instructions begin partway through cooking a stirred lemon custard; no measurements for juice, sugar, yolks or thickener are given. Use a lemon filling recipe you trust and follow the handling directions here.
- Puff pastePeriod puff paste is laminated pastry, not modern American pie dough. The recipe as written pours the cooled filling into a raw lined plate and bakes it; if you prefer a crisper base, part-baking the shell first is a modern departure, and the recipe gives no oven temperature to work from.
- The meringue ovenTwo tablespoons of powdered sugar for the whites makes a soft, low-sugar meringue that colours fast. Spread it so it touches the crust all the way round, and leave the door ajar as directed; no oven temperature is given, so keep the heat moderate and pull the pie as soon as it is delicately browned.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term generally means finely ground sugar rather than the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today. Either works; superfine dissolves into the whites most cleanly.
- "Casserole" means the potIn a cookbook of this vintage a casserole is a lidded stovetop-and-oven vessel, not a baked dish. Any covered braiser or heavy pan with a lid does the job.
- The sausage bake"Bake thirty minutes over high flame" gives no temperature and the phrase is ambiguous between oven and range heat. Whatever heat you use, pricked sausages buried under mashed potato, egg and crumbs need to reach 160F internally, so check with a thermometer rather than trusting the browning of the crust.
- Assembling the layersMashed potato spread over raw sausages will slump unless it is stiff and fairly dry. Brush the beaten egg on thinly, then the crumbs, or the egg pools and scrambles under the topping.
Celebrity cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s often asked stage and screen names for a favourite dish and a signature, which is why these pages end in a closing salutation rather than a serving note. Ann Murdock was a Broadway leading lady who also appeared in silent film in the middle 1910s. Smothering meat under potato and crumbs is a long-standing English and American economy, related to shepherd's pie.