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Peach Meringue Pie
Pare and stew ripe peaches. When nearly done, sweeten, take from the fire. Stir in a heaping teaspoonful fresh butter to each pie. Pour in a deep pie-plate, lined with paste. Bake; when done, remove from the oven and cover with the whites of three eggs beaten to a stiff froth, and sweetened with three tablespoonfuls powdered sugar. Set back in the oven to brown slightly. Apple meringue pie may be made in the same way, only flavoring the fruit.-Mrs.
A single-crust stewed-fruit pie with a soft meringue lid, written for a cook who already knows how to line a plate with pastry. The proportions are left almost entirely to judgment, so a few numbers help.
- Quantity of fruitFor a 9-inch deep plate, figure 2 1/2 to 3 lb ripe peaches, which gives roughly 4 cups of prepared fruit after paring and stewing down. Sugar to taste, generally 1/2 to 3/4 cup depending on the fruit.
- Stew it dry, not saucyThe hinge of the recipe is "when nearly done" — the peaches should be tender but still holding shape, with the liquid cooked down. Wet filling in an unthickened single crust means a soggy bottom; if the fruit throws a lot of juice, reduce it before it goes in.
- Pastry needs blind bakingPastry -- as written, the shell is lined, filled and baked once; there is no blind baking here, and no oven temperature is given. Since the filling is already cooked, some cooks today prefer to line the plate, chill it, and part-bake the shell with weights before filling, then return it briefly to set the crust. That is a modern precaution rather than the book's method.
- "A heaping teaspoonful fresh butter"About 1 1/2 teaspoons. "Fresh" here means unsalted and sweet — much nineteenth-century butter was salted for keeping, and the distinction mattered.
- Meringue proportionsThree whites to three tablespooons powdered sugar is a lean, old-style soft meringue. Modern practice is closer to two tablespoons of sugar per white for stability; add it gradually once the whites hold soft peaks, and beat to stiff, glossy peaks.
- Browning temperature"Set back in the oven to brown slightly" implies a short spell in a hot oven; the book gives no temperature. A few minutes at around 400F will colour the tips, or a longer, gentler spell at 350F if you want the meringue cooked further through. Spread it to the edge of the crust so it seals and does not shrink back.
- Weeping and slicingPut the meringue onto hot filling, which helps set its underside, and cool the pie away from drafts. Cut with a wet knife. Serves 6 to 8, and it does not keep well past the day it is made.
- The apple variation"Flavoring the fruit" for the apple version is left open; nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon rind or rosewater would all be at hand in a kitchen of this sort. The recipe asks for flavouring only in the apple version, which suggests the peaches were thought to need none.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, edited by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1878, is a compilation credited on its title page to "two hundred and fifty ladies of Virginia and her sister states," which is why so many entries end abruptly with a name ᒰ the attribution to "Mrs." here has simply lost its second half somewhere between the contributor and the printed page. Peaches were abundant in Virginia and the upper South, and cookbooks of the period carry dozens of ways to use them across a short season: stewed, brandied, pickled, dried, and baked into pies like this one. The meringue top belongs to a broader family of nineteenth-century American "meringue pies" ᒰ lemon, apple, sweet potato ᒰ in which a cooked filling was crowned with sweetened whites, a use for the egg whites left over when yolks went into custards and cakes. Powdered sugar is specified because a soft meringue needs sugar that dissolves quickly in the froth, and household loaf sugar had to be pounded and sifted before it would do so.