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Lemon Pie
Four eggs, six tablespoons of sugar, five tablespoons of cold water, the grated rind and juice of one lemon, one tablespoon of melted butter, and a pinch of salt. Beat the yolks and sugar, stir in the rest and bake. Beat the whites sweetened, and spread over the top and brown slightly. -Mrs Whitney.
This is a custard-style lemon pie rather than the cornstarch-thickened kind: the eggs alone do the setting, so the filling stays soft and the baking is gentle. The original assumes you know how to handle pastry and gives no oven heat, no pan size and no sugar quantity for the meringue.
- The crust is assumedNo pastry is given with the filling. Since the filling is a wet custard, the shell wants to be partly blind-baked — lined and weighted at 400F for about 15 minutes — or the bottom will stay pale and damp.
- Oven heatBake the filling at 325 to 350F. Custard set by yolks alone curdles and weeps above that; the filling is done when the center still trembles slightly, roughly 20 to 25 minutes in an 8-inch shell.
- Pan size and yieldFour eggs, six tablespoons sugar and five of water make a shallow filling — enough for one 8-inch pie, six modest slices. In a 9-inch plate it will look thin.
- The meringue sugar"Beat the whites sweetened" leaves the amount to the cook. One to two tablespoons of sugar per white, added a spoonful at a time once the whites are frothy, is the usual proportion and gives a meringue that holds its shape.
- Browning the meringueSpread it over the filling while the pie is still hot and press it right out to the pastry rim; sealing it to the edge helps keep it from shrinking and sliding. "Brown slightly" suggests only a light colour — roughly 10 minutes at 350F, or 3 to 4 minutes at 400F if you want a darker crown.
- Lemon quantityA lemon of the period may well have been smaller and sharper than a large modern supermarket one. Expect about 3 tablespoons of juice; taste the mixed filling before it goes in and add a little more sugar if it is sharper than you like.
- Cutting itCool completely before slicing — several hours. A warm egg custard has not finished setting and will run into the plate.
Lemon pie of this kind — yolks, sugar, a little water and the whole of a lemon, capped with sweetened whites — was one common American formula in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the type is often said to have given way, over time, to the dense, sliceable curd most people now picture, thickened with cornstarch and condensed milk, though cornstarch-thickened lemon pies were already in circulation. The signature is the telling detail: recipes printed under their contributors' own names mean a page of pies might carry half a dozen different hands and half a dozen different levels of detail. Mrs Whitney evidently wrote for women who already had a crust in the oven and needed only the proportions, which is why the instruction "and bake" is allowed to stand alone.