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Vinegar Pie
1 large C water 1 T butter 2 T vinegar Yolk 1 egg 1 C sugar 1 heaping T cornstarch Cook until thick. Frost with white of egg. 1 C sugar 3 T flour Butter size of walnut Mrs. C. L. Thomson.
A stovetop custard poured into a baked shell, from the era when a lemon in February was a luxury and vinegar stood in for it. The recipe assumes you already know how to blind-bake a crust and beat a meringue.
- The abbreviationsC is cup, T is tablespoon. "1 large C water" means a generous cup rather than a level measure. "Butter size of walnut" is conventionally taken as roughly 1 tablespoon.
- Two ingredient listsThe lines after "Frost with white of egg" — 1 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons flour, butter the size of a walnut — cannot belong to the meringue, which needs only egg white and sugar. They may be the remains of a second, flour-thickened version of the pie whose instructions are missing; whatever the cause, work from the first list.
- The crust is assumedNo pastry is given. You need a fully blind-baked 8- or 9-inch shell before you start; the filling is cooked on the stove and will not bake a raw crust from underneath.
- Vinegar to usePlain white distilled or cider vinegar. Two tablespoons in a cup of water reads alarming but is a modest amount of acid once diluted; it stands in for the sharpness of lemon, which is the point of the substitution. Do not use balsamic or a flavoured vinegar.
- Cooking the fillingWhisk the cornstarch into the sugar dry, then add the water and vinegar so it does not lump. Bring to a full boil, whisking, and hold it there a minute — cornstarch does not reach its thickest until it boils, and undercooked starch will weep. Temper the yolk with a little hot mixture before adding it back, then cook one more minute and stir in the butter off the heat.
- The meringueOne white will barely cover a 9-inch pie; two is more practical. Beat to soft peaks, add 2 tablespoons sugar per white, beat stiff and glossy, spread so it seals to the crust edge, and bake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes until browned.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Cool at least two hours before cutting; the filling sets as it drops to room temperature.
Vinegar pie belongs to a family of American "desperation" or "mock" pies — alongside mock apple, mock cherry and water pie — that supplied the sharpness of citrus from the pantry rather than the fruit stand. It shows up throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Midwest, where lemons were an expensive winter import and vinegar was in every kitchen, and it is generally traced to the same frugal impulse as chess and transparent pies: sugar, egg, fat, a thickener and an acid, in whatever shell was to hand.</br>