Home › Cookery › Lemon Cream Pie
Lemon Cream Pie
One cupful sugar, one of water; one raw potato, grated; juice and grated rind of one lemon. Bake in pastry, top and bottom.
A starch-set lemon pie with no eggs and no butter: the grated raw potato is the thickener, and everything else is sugar, water and lemon. Treat it as a mock lemon pie rather than a curd.
- The potato is the thickenerGrated raw potato releases starch that gelatinizes in the oven and sets the filling. A starchy variety (russet) has more free starch than a waxy one and will set more firmly. The recipe does not specify the size of the potato or how much grated potato it yields.
- Grate at the last momentGrated potato browns within minutes on contact with air. Grate it directly into the lemon juice and stir at once, or the filling will bake out grey-beige instead of pale yellow.
- Zest, not pith"Grated rind" means the coloured outer layer only. Take it off with a rasp grater before juicing; white pith turns the filling bitter, and there is nothing else in this pie to hide it.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A workable modern approach is a hot oven (around 425F) for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then moderate (around 350F) until the filling no longer sloshes when the pan is nudged; the timings are a reconstruction, not the book's instruction.
- Vent the top"Pastry, top and bottom" means a double crust over a very wet filling. Cut steam slits or the top will lift off the filling in a dome and the edges will leak.
- Expect a soft setOne cup each of sugar and water is a lot of liquid for one potato's worth of starch. The result slices best fully cold, and even then it will be spoonable rather than firm. Chilling several hours helps.
- YieldEnough for one 8- or 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. There is no pastry recipe here; use any standard double-crust quantity.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives. Pies like this one belong to a large family of nineteenth-century "mock" desserts, in which a cheap staple stands in for something expensive: crackers for apples, vinegar for lemon, and here grated raw potato for the eggs that would otherwise thicken a lemon filling. Potato starch was a well-understood thickener long before boxed cornstarch was cheap and universal, and a grated potato is simply the same starch in its original packaging. The recipe's terseness is characteristic of the book, which gives little more than the proportions.