Citron Pie
Use Plain or Chopped Paste. For filling, mix two cups seeded raisins chopped, two cups citron chopped, one and one half cups sugar, grated rind of one lemon, four tablespoons lemon juice, one eighth teaspoon salt.
A stiff, mincemeat-style filling for a double-crust pie, given in the shorthand of a book that assumes you have already read its pastry chapter.
- "Plain or Chopped Paste"Paste means pastry dough; the two are the book's plain short crust and a flakier version in which the fat is chopped rather than rubbed in. Any all-butter or shortening double-crust recipe using about 2 cups flour will do, rolled for a 9-inch pan with a top crust.
- Which citronAlmost certainly candied citron peel, sold in tubs at holiday time and the same ingredient that went into fruit cake. If you buy it in whole slabs, chop it small; pre-diced peel is often drier and coarser. Preserved citron melon, a separate ingredient, was also sold as citron and turns up in pies elsewhere, but candied peel is the likelier reading for a book of this kind.
- No liquid, no thickenerAs written the filling is fruit, sugar and 4 tablespoons of lemon juice, which is little moisture for 4 cups of chopped raisins and peel. Consider adding about 1/2 cup water or apple cider and letting the mixture stand half an hour before filling so the raisins swell.
- Sugar levelOne and a half cups of sugar on top of candied peel is very sweet by current taste. Cutting it to about 1 cup keeps the pie recognizable and lets the lemon show.
- OvenBake at 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then reduce to 350F for 25 to 30 minutes until the top is browned and the filling bubbles at the vents. Cut steam slits before baking.
- Yield and servingOne 9-inch pie, eight small wedges. It is rich in the way mincemeat is rich, and it is better warm than hot, or at room temperature the next day.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it mixes promotional chocolate recipes with a full general cookbook around them. This pie can be grouped with the so-called mock mince pies, which built a mincemeat-like flavor from raisins, candied peel and lemon without meat or suet. Candied citron was a familiar baking ingredient of the period, going into fruit cake, pound cake and puddings, and its bitter-perfumed edge is what keeps a filling this sweet from cloying.