Orange Pie
Pulp and juice of two oranges, a little of the grated peel, the yolks of three eggs, one cupful sugar, one cupful milk. Stir the yolks with the sugar, then a tablespoonful of butter, then the juice, lastly the milk. Bake in a dish. After the pie has cooled, spread on it the whites of the three eggs, stiffly frothed and sweetened. Then set it again on the fire, to brown slightly.-Mrs.
A single-crust orange custard pie with a soft meringue, written for a cook who already knows how to line a plate with pastry. The whole thing turns on keeping the acid from breaking the custard.
- Add the juice last-ish, and slowlyAdd the juice before the milk, as written -- Orange juice can curdle a milk custard. The recipe's order — yolks and sugar, butter, juice, then milk — puts the acid in before the dairy; whether that was intentional is not stated, but it is worth following, adding the milk gently.
- "Bake in a dish"Almost certainly a pastry-lined pie plate, though the recipe never says so, gives no size, and says nothing about pre-baking the shell. Baked without pastry it is simply a baked orange custard.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Set the custard at 325-350F until the centre is just barely wobbly, roughly 35-45 minutes. Above 375F the eggs tighten and weep.
- Browning the meringue"Set it again on the fire" is best read as back into the oven; a top meringue cannot be browned over a burner. A hot oven for a few minutes will colour the peaks before the custard beneath overcooks. No temperature or time is given in the recipe.
- Meringue proportionsThree whites want about 6 tablespoons of sugar, beaten in a spoonful at a time after soft peaks form. Spread it so it touches the crust all the way round or it will shrink and slide.
- The peel"A little of the grated peel" means the coloured part only, a small quantity left to the cook's judgement. If your oranges are very sweet, a squeeze of lemon sharpens the filling.
- ButterOne tablespoonful, as given; softened, or melted and allowed to cool. Very hot butter stirred into raw yolks can cook them in streaks.
- YieldOne pie; the recipe gives no dish size. Serve the day it is made; meringue on a custard base beads and weeps overnight in the refrigerator.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is a subscription cookbook of the kind Southern households produced in quantity after the war — recipes solicited from named contributors, printed largely as they arrived, initials and all. The truncated "-Mrs." at the end here may be a compositor's casualty, or simply the mark of an excerpt cut short; either way it is no mystery. Orange pies belong to a family of citrus custards that runs alongside lemon pie in American books, and they show up in Virginia collections often enough. Meringue applied to a cooled pie and browned separately is generally said to be the older method; folding it onto a hot filling, which helps prevent weeping, is often described as the later standard advice.