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Lemon Cream Pie
1/2 cup milk 1½ teaspoons cornstarch Juice and grated rind of 1 lemon Yolks of 3 eggs Whites of 3 eggs 3 tablespoons sugar Bake the pie crust first. Heat the milk; add next four ingredients as in making custard; pour this, boiling, upon the whites, beaten light and mixed with the three tablespoons of sugar. Pour into the crust and brown slightly in a hot oven.
This page came out of a loose-leaf book, and it shows: the ingredient list has been jumbled and the tail end (1 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons flour, 1½ cup molasses) almost certainly belongs to the recipe that sat beside it on the sheet. Read it as a boiled lemon custard poured over sweetened beaten whites, in a pre-baked shell.
- The missing milkThe method says "Heat the milk" but no quantity is given anywhere in the list. A custard filling for one 9-inch pie of this sort ordinarily takes about 1½ to 2 cups; the original is genuinely silent, so treat the amount as unrecorded rather than assume.
- The stray molassesMolasses has no place in a lemon cream pie and there is no instruction for it, nor for the cup of sugar and two tablespoons of flour. These lines are almost certainly bleed-through from a neighbouring molasses pie or cake recipe on the same leaf. Ignore them.
- ThickeningOne and a half teaspoons of cornstarch is a light set for a full pie filling — closer to a pouring custard than a sliceable cream. If you want a filling that holds a cut edge, more starch is needed, and the original gives you no help there.
- The hinge: boiling custard onto the whitesThe custard should be genuinely boiling when it hits the beaten whites and sugar; that heat is what partly cooks and stiffens the whites folded through it. A cooler custard is likelier to give a slack filling.
- "A hot oven"Period books use the term loosely; it is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F, with no fixed standard behind it. Here it is only for colour on the top, so it is a matter of a few minutes' watching, not a baking time.
- Bake the crust firstBlind-bake fully — line the shell, weight it, 400°F until dry and coloured through. The filling goes in cooked and returns to the oven only long enough to brown, so a pale raw-tasting crust will stay that way.
- LemonJuice and rind of one lemon is roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of juice and a teaspoon or more of zest from a modern supermarket lemon. Note that the original puts the lemon in with the custard, which is then boiled; long boiling with acid dulls the flavour and can thin a starch-set custard.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Serve it cold — a custard of this looseness is much better after several hours in the refrigerator.
Lemon cream pies of this type sit between two older English forms: the lemon curd tart and the boiled milk custard. What distinguishes this version is the technique of pouring the boiling custard over beaten egg whites rather than piling a separate meringue on top and baking it — the whites are cooked by the custard's own heat and become part of the filling, giving a light, foamy body throughout instead of a distinct meringue cap. The result is closer to what many nineteenth-century books called a "cream" pie. Its apparent appearance under Cakes rather than a pastry chapter would be a reminder of how loosely these categories were kept, and the recipe's confused state is characteristic of loose-leaf cook books, a format that made recipes easy to swap and easy to scramble.