Lemon Pie
Use Plain Paste. For filling, mix two tablespoons cornstarch, one cup sugar, and one half cup boiling water, boil five minutes, add one tablespoon butter, juice and rind of one lemon, and two eggs well beaten.
Lemon Pie No. 2 Use Plain Paste. For filling, mix one cup sugar, yolks of four eggs, one eighth teaspoon salt, one cup milk, grated rind and juice of one lemon, and the whites of four eggs beaten until stiff. Cover with meringue when done.
Two fillings for one crust, printed together as they often were in period books. Neither gives an oven temperature or a time, and both assume the reader already knows the book's Plain Paste.
- Plain PasteThe book's basic short pastry, quoted elsewhere in the book and not repeated here. Any all-butter or lard-and-butter pie dough will stand in; both fillings want a bottom crust only, and the pan size is left to the cook.
- Blind bake the shellNo. 1's filling is fully cooked on the stove, so the crust gets no oven time to set and is best baked blind first; No. 2, being a raw custard, can be baked in an unbaked shell as period cooks did, though a partly pre-baked base gives a crisper result. If blind baking, line and weight the shell and bake at 425F for about 15 minutes, then remove the weights and give it another 5 to 8 minutes.
- Temper the eggs in No. 1The cornstarch mixture comes off a five-minute boil. Beat a ladle of it into the beaten eggs first, then return everything to the pan, or the eggs scramble and the filling turns grainy.
- Acid lastLemon juice weakens cornstarch if it boils with it. Add the juice and rind with the butter after the five-minute boil is finished, as written, and do not return the pan to a hard boil afterwards.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none for either. No. 1's filling is already cooked and thickened, so it needs only enough oven heat to set the eggs through, a moderate oven of about 350F for 20 minutes; No. 2 is a custard and suits the same moderate oven, roughly 30 to 35 minutes, since too hot an oven will curdle and weep it.
- What No. 2 actually doesSugar, yolks, milk, lemon and folded whites make what other books of the period call lemon sponge pie: it separates in the oven into a light cake layer over a soft lemon custard. That separation is the point, not a fault.
- The meringue line is contradictoryNo. 2 already uses all four whites in the filling, so there is nothing left to cover it with. If you want the meringue, hold back two whites from the filling and beat them with 4 tablespoons sugar, or use two fresh whites; brown at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes.
- Grate before you juiceTake the zest off the whole lemon first, avoiding the white pith, then cut and squeeze. One lemon gives roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of juice and about a tablespoon of rind, depending on size.
- YieldNo. 1 makes a shallow filling by modern standards; period pie plates varied, and in a deep 9-inch pan you may want to increase it by half. Either pie cuts into six to eight slices and both are best the day they are made.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Rumford, put out a full general cookbook as advertising rather than a mere leaflet of chocolate recipes. Lemon pie earns two versions here: the cornstarch-thickened filling of No. 1, and the egg-and-milk custard of No. 2, a sponge pie that thickens on eggs alone and separates into two layers as it bakes. The terseness is typical of the era's house-brand books, which give little more than the proportions.