Home › Luncheon Dishes › Lemon Pie Filling
Lemon Pie Filling
1 1/2 C milk 1 C sugar 2 eggs 2 T cornstarch 2 lemons-(juice) and grated rind of one Scald milk, thicken with sugar and cornstarch mixed. Combine egg yolks with a T scalded milk and add to mixture. Cook 10 minutes. Remove from fire, add salt and beat well. When cold, add lemon. Place in previously baked pie crust. Cover with meringue of egg whites. Mrs. S. C. Kimball.
Note: Mrs. Thomas Corlett uses 1¼ C milk and 3 eggs.
A church-supper cornstarch lemon filling, typeset so badly that the ingredient list has drifted to the end of the paragraph. Read the whole thing before starting, and note the one point that makes or breaks it: the lemon goes in cold, at the end.
- The scrambled ingredient listWorking from both halves of the entry, the filling is 1 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons cornstarch, 2 egg yolks, the juice of 2 lemons and the grated rind of 1, a pinch of salt, milk, and 2 egg whites for the meringue. T is tablespoon, C is cup.
- The missing milkNo quantity of milk appears in Mrs. Kimball's list. The variant note reads "14 C milk," apparently a dropped fraction, perhaps 1 1/4 cups; something around 1 1/2 cups suits 2 tablespoons cornstarch and 1 cup sugar.
- Acid last, and whyCornstarch loses thickening power in acid, particularly with prolonged heating. Cooking the starch base with the milk and sugar first, then stirring the lemon juice and rind into the cooled custard, helps the filling set rather than thin and weep.
- "Cook 10 minutes"Read as 10 minutes of gentle cooking once the mixture has thickened, stirring constantly, long enough to cook out the raw starch taste. A heavy saucepan over medium-low works; the recipe does not say what vessel was used.
- Tempering the yolksOne tablespoon of scalded milk is not much dilution. Whisk the yolks with two or three tablespoons of the hot mixture, then return them to the pan in a thin stream while stirring, or you will get threads of cooked egg.
- The meringue is not finishedThe recipe gives no baking direction at all, only "cover with meringue of egg whites." A modern handling: beat the 2 whites to soft peaks with a little sugar, spread so it seals to the crust edge all the way around, and bake in a moderate oven until the peaks colour. None of that detail is in the original.
- Cold filling, weeping meringueMeringue spread on a fully cold filling tends to slide and pool underneath. Modern practice is to mound it on while the filling is still warm; if you follow the original and chill first, expect some liquid at the base.
- YieldOne previously baked shell; the recipe does not state a pan size. Mrs. Corlett's version, with 3 eggs and the "14 C" milk, would give a softer set.
Cornstarch lemon pie belongs to the era when commercial cornstarch made a smooth, cheap custard possible in any kitchen; before that, lemon pies leaned on eggs alone, in far greater number, or on a bread-and-butter base. Cookbooks like this one were sold to raise money for the church, and their value lay in the names attached: a reader knew whose lemon pie she was getting. The appended note that Mrs. Thomas Corlett does it differently is a small monument to how these books were compiled — two women submitted nearly the same recipe, and rather than choose, the committee printed both.</p>