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Mock Lemon Pie
3 eggs. 1 cup sugar 1½ pints buttermilk 1 teaspoon extract of lemon 1½ tablespoons Five Roses flour
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, which was normal in books built from contributed recipes — the compiler assumed you already knew how a custard pie behaves. The gaps are worth naming before you start.
- What is missingNo crust, no eggs, no oven temperature and no baking time are given. As written the four listed ingredients make a thin sweetened batter, not a filling that will slice; comparable buttermilk pies of the period generally call for eggs to set the filling, and the flour alone will not do it.
- Measures1½ pints of buttermilk is 3 cups by US measure, or nearer 3¾ cups if an imperial pint of 20 fluid ounces was intended, as it may well have been in a Canadian book of this date. Either way it is a large volume of liquid — enough for two shallow 9-inch pies, or one deep one, and far more than 1½ tablespoons of flour can thicken.
- Extract of lemonLemon extract was, and remains, oil of lemon in alcohol; strength varied by maker, so taste as you go. A teaspoon in this quantity of buttermilk was meant to carry the whole flavour of the pie, since no fruit is used at all.
- ButtermilkPeriod buttermilk was the liquid left from churning — thin, tangy, lightly flecked with butterfat, and more or less sour depending on how far the cream had ripened. Cultured buttermilk sold today is thicker and can read sharper. Do not substitute sweet milk; the acidity is the point of the lemon impression.
- The flourFive Roses was a hard-wheat household flour, sold by the mill that published this book. Modern all-purpose is close enough at this quantity, but sift or whisk it into the sugar first — dumped into buttermilk it lumps immediately.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven at all. Treated as a baked custard, around 350F until the centre barely trembles is a safe modern starting point; anything hotter risks curdling the buttermilk and weeping water into the crust.
- YieldAssume one 9-inch single-crust pie, six to eight servings, and expect to hold back some of the buttermilk unless you add eggs.
"Mock" recipes did the work of an absent ingredient: mock turtle soup used a calf's head, mock duck used a shoulder of lamb, and mock lemon pie used acid and extract in place of lemons, which in rural Canada in 1913 were an imported winter luxury. Buttermilk supplied the tartness, and lemon extract could be kept on the pantry shelf. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as an advertisement for its flour and assembled largely from recipes sent in by customers, which explains the telegraphic form here — a contributor writing out a familiar pie saw no reason to record the oven or the crust."