Home › Luncheon Dishes › Lemon Cake Pie
Lemon Cake Pie
3 T flour. Butter size of walnut. 2 eggs 1 C milk 1 lemon (juice and rind) Mix together sugar, flour, beaten egg yolks, lemon juice and rind, butter and add milk slowly. Beat egg whites stiff and fold in. Pour in unbaked crust. Bake in moderate oven until a nice brown. Mrs. E. J. Brixen. 1½ C milk 1 C sugar Salt 2 eggs
A lemon sponge or "cake" pie, where the batter separates in the oven into a cake layer on top and a soft lemon custard beneath. The ingredient list as printed is scrambled and incomplete, so read the notes below before you start.
- The list is brokenEggs and milk are each listed twice (1 cup and 1½ cups), and the flour and butter called for in the method never appear with a quantity at all. Comparable lemon cake pies of the period use 1 cup sugar, 2 to 3 tablespoons flour, 1 tablespoon butter, 2 eggs and 1 to 1½ cups milk; treat those as reconstruction, not as what Mrs. Brixen wrote.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F. A pie with an unbaked bottom crust and a wet filling benefits from starting nearer 400F for the first ten minutes to set the pastry, then dropping back to a moderate oven for the rest.
- The hinge is the foldingThe separation into two layers depends largely on the stiffly beaten whites being folded in rather than stirred, along with the thin, high-liquid batter itself. Overwork the whites and you are more likely to get one uniform, slightly rubbery custard instead of cake over lemon.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest of one lemon; the white pith underneath is bitter and there is nothing in the recipe to mask it. Zest before juicing.
- Adding the milk"Add milk slowly" matters because the flour and sugar need to disperse without lumping. The batter will look thin and may look curdled from the acid meeting the milk; that is expected and it sets in the oven.
- Doneness"A nice brown" is about 40 to 50 minutes. The top should be domed and set to the touch and a knife inserted at the edge should come out clean, though the centre will still wobble slightly under its cake layer.
- Yield and servingProbably a 9-inch pie, six to eight servings, though the recipe gives no dish size and the quantities as printed are incomplete. It cuts cleanly only once fully cool, and being a milk-and-egg filling it wants refrigerating.
Lemon cake pie belongs to a large family of American lemon pies built on the one citrus fruit that shipped and stored comparatively well, stretched with milk, flour and sugar rather than the several eggs a lemon curd or chess pie demands. It is often grouped with the Pennsylvania lemon sponge pie, and self-separating lemon batters appear in cookbooks throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under names like lemon puff pie and lemon pudding pie. The garbled ingredient list is characteristic of compiled community cookbooks, which were typeset from handwritten contributions with little editing.