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Lemon Cream Mpie
1 C sugar. 2 egg yolks. 2 T cornstarch. 1 lemon (juice and rind) 1 C milk Pinch salt 1 orange (juice and rind) Cook the above until thick, and when cool, pour into a previously baked pie shell. Make meringue of the two egg whites, return to oven to brown.
Linna Corlett.
A community-cookbook entry of the compressed sort — the contributor listed what she thought worth listing and assumed the rest. As printed, the ingredient list is incomplete, so read it as a sketch of a citrus cream filling rather than a set of working instructions.
- What is missingThere is no sugar, no thickener and no egg yolks in the list, yet the method says "cook until thick" and the meringue is made from "the two egg whites" — whites that were never introduced. A filling of this type in this period would take roughly 2 egg yolks, about 1 cup sugar and 2-3 tablespoons cornstarch or flour to the cup of milk.
- 1 COne cup of milk, 8 fluid ounces. That volume of liquid suits an 8-inch shell at most; a 9-inch pan will give a shallow, mean-looking pie.
- Milk and citrus togetherThe juice of a whole lemon plus a whole orange stirred into hot milk will curdle it. Custards of this kind are normally thickened first and the juice beaten in off the heat at the end, which is almost certainly what was meant and not what was written.
- RindZest only — the coloured outer layer. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century recipes say "rind" loosely, but the white pith is bitter and does not soften in a custard.
- A previously baked shellBlind-bake the shell fully before filling. The recipe gives no temperature or method, so any figure is a modern addition; the point that matters is that a wet filling will soften an under-baked crust.
- Browning the meringue"Return to oven to brown" gives neither temperature nor time. Note that the recipe has the filling cooled before it goes into the shell. Two whites is a thin covering for any pie larger than 8 inches; three or four gives the height modern readers expect.
- YieldOne 8-inch pie, six modest slices.
Lemon cream pies — filling thickened with milk and eggs rather than water and cornstarch alone — ran through American church and club cookbooks, and adding an orange to stretch or soften the lemon is often said to have been a domestic economy: citrus was shipped north in quantity by rail and steamship by the turn of the century, but it was still bought by the piece, not the bag. Community cookbooks of this kind typically credited each dish to the woman who supplied it. They are also compressed: contributors wrote for neighbours who already knew that a cream filling took yolks, sugar and a thickener, and who would ask at the next meeting if they did not. Recipes of this kind are best read as reminders rather than instructions.