Louise Kelly
LEMON PIE
4 eggs, beaten to a creamwhites separately 2 cups of sugar 1 tablespoonful of flour 1 cup of milk Grated rind and juice of one large lemon 1 tablespoon of lard Cut the lard into flour with a knife and, when mixed, add a few spoons of ice water. This for the crust. Roll out and line pie pan.
Mix the sugar, yolks, lemon and milk and cook in double boiler about ten minutes.
Bake the crust a light brown on edge, remove from oven and fill with pie mixture, and return to oven for five minutes. Remove again and spread top with beaten whites. Brown in oven.
This is my first attempt on the typewriter. Very nice! I mean THE PIE is very nice.
A celebrity-contributed lemon meringue pie, written quickly and with the crust half-specified. The filling is sound; the pastry needs reading between the lines.
- The crust flour is missingThe recipe directs the single tablespoon of flour into the pastry ("Cut the lard into flour with a knife... This for the crust"), but a tablespoon each of flour and lard is nowhere near enough for a shell, and no other flour quantity is given anywhere; the filling as written has no thickener at all. For the crust use a standard single-crust formula: about 1¼ cups flour, ½ teaspoon salt, ⅓ cup lard or shortening, 3-4 tablespoons ice water.
- Blind-bake properly"Bake the crust a light brown on edge" means a full blind bake. Line with parchment and weights at 425F for 15 minutes, remove the weights, and give it another 8-10 minutes until the base is dry and pale gold. An unweighted shell will slump.
- Ten minutes will not thicken itAs written the filling has no starch at all (the flour goes into the crust), so it depends on four yolks against a cup of milk and two cups of sugar, and a double boiler is slow. Cook and stir until the mixture visibly coats the spoon and holds a line drawn across it — likely longer than the ten minutes given — then give it the five minutes in the oven at 350F.
- Two cups of sugar is a period measureAll of it goes into the filling here, which is a great deal of sugar for one lemon. Modern lemon pies of this size use ¾ to 1 cup in the filling and roughly ½ cup in the meringue. Cutting the filling sugar to about 1 cup keeps the lemon audible, though the custard will set a little differently.
- Meringue on a hot fillingSpread the beaten whites while the filling is still hot from the oven and take the meringue right out to touch the crust all around. Meringue laid on a cold filling weeps underneath and shrinks away from the edge.
- Browning temperature"Brown in oven" is ambiguous. A moderate oven, 350F for 12-15 minutes, cooks the whites through as well as colouring them; a quick 425F for 5 minutes browns the peaks but leaves the base of the meringue barely warm.
- Beat the whites with sugarThe recipe treats the whites as plain foam. Beating in 4-6 tablespoons of the sugar, a spoonful at a time once soft peaks form, gives a stable meringue that slices instead of collapsing.
- YieldProbably one 9-inch pie, eight slices. Cool at least three hours before cutting; a warm lemon custard runs.
This reads like a contribution to one of the celebrity or charity cookbooks that circulated in the early twentieth century, in which stage and screen performers were asked to send in a favourite dish — the appeal being the signature as much as the cooking, which would account for the chatty, under-measured, hastily written character of the page; the source is not identified here. Kelly's closing aside about the typewriter is as much the point of the page as the pie. The dish belongs to the American lemon meringue tradition, whose ancestry is commonly traced to the Philadelphia cookery teacher Elizabeth Goodfellow and her lemon pudding baked in a crust, though that attribution is traditional rather than documented; by around 1900 flour- or cornstarch-thickened lemon fillings under a browned meringue appear widely in household manuals. Lard was the ordinary pie fat in such kitchens.