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Pastry (Remainder with the grated rind)
remainder with the grated rind and juice of the lemon for twenty minutes. Strain and add to the water the other ingredients. When thickened pour into a paste-shell and cover with a meringue made from the whites of the eggs and one cup of sugar.
Brown in a moderate oven and serve cold.
This page is the tail end of a lemon pie recipe — the first lines, with the ingredient quantities, sit on the previous page. What survives here is the method, and it is workable if you read it against any standard lemon meringue filling.
- What is missingThe fragment begins mid-sentence: the water, sugar, a thickener and the egg yolks were presumably listed above. Treat this as method notes rather than a complete formula, and take quantities from a full lemon meringue pie recipe of similar scale.
- "Paste-shell"A pastry shell. Because the filling goes in already thickened and is only browned briefly, the shell needs to be baked and cooled first: line a 9-inch pan, dock the base, and bake at 400F until dry and lightly coloured; a raw shell will not cook through under a wet filling.
- Moderate oven350F. At that heat a meringue needs roughly 12-15 minutes to colour and set through. If you want a faster, darker top, 400F for about 8 minutes works, but the interior stays softer.
- The twenty-minute steepThe rind and juice sit in the water for twenty minutes and are then strained out; the surviving text does not say whether this is done over heat. Do not skip the straining — the point is lemon flavour without shreds of zest in the filling.
- Add acid off the heat if you canLemon juice weakens cornstarch as it cooks; thickening the water and sugar first, then stirring in the strained lemon and yolks, gives a firmer set than boiling it all together.
- One cup of sugar in the meringueThat is generous by modern habit, which runs to about 2 tablespoons per egg white. The fragment does not say how many eggs were used, so the exact ratio cannot be pinned down; a cup will beat to a stiff, sweet, marshmallowy meringue, while less sugar gives a lighter, drier top.
- Sealing and weepingSpread the meringue so it touches the crust all round and spread it over filling that is still warm. Gaps at the edge and a cold filling are the two reasons meringue shrinks and beads liquid.
- Serve coldCool at room temperature for two or three hours before cutting. Refrigeration firms the filling but softens the meringue.
Good Things to Eat was published in 1911 by Rufus Estes, who was born into slavery in Tennessee and spent his working life cooking — for Chicago restaurants, then for the Pullman Company's private railroad cars, then for the subsidiary of U.S. Steel. It is generally cited as one of the first cookbooks written and published by an African American chef, and it reads like a professional's working notebook: terse, confident, assuming the reader already knows what a paste-shell is. Lemon meringue pie of this type — a water-and-starch filling flavoured by steeping the rind, capped with a sugar-heavy meringue — was standard American pastry by the late nineteenth century.