Home › Cakes › Lemon Meringue Pie
Lemon Meringue Pie
1 cup water. 1 tablespoon cornstarch 1 cup sugar Butter size of 1 egg Juice and grated rind of 1 lemon Yolks of 2 eggs Whites of 2 eggs 2 tablespoons sugar Boil the water; wet the cornstarch and stir it in; boil until clear and pour on the sugar and butter. When cool add the lemon and egg yolks and pour into a pie plate lined with any kind of paste preferred. Bake in a hot oven, having the greatest heat at the bottom of the oven. When nearly done cover with a meringue made from the whites of the eggs and two teaspoons of granulated sugar and return to the oven to brown. 1/2 cup milk 1 cup sugar
The transcription is incomplete in a couple of places, so read it against the notes below before you start. Everything it asks for is straightforward, but the quantities need reconstructing.
- The missing waterThe instructions open with "boil the water," but no water appears in the ingredient list. A filling with 1 tablespoon cornstarch and 1 cup sugar points to roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups water; the stray "1/2 cup milk 1 cup sugar" at the end appears to be stray type, whether from a neighbouring recipe or a displaced line of this one. One tablespoon of cornstarch to a cup of liquid gives a soft, barely-set filling by modern standards.
- Butter size of an eggA standard nineteenth-century measure: about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- Meringue sugarThe ingredient list says 2 tablespoons sugar, the method says two teaspoons. Use the tablespoons. Two whites can carry 2 to 4 tablespoons comfortably, and the extra sugar helps the meringue hold.
- Hot oven, heat at the bottom"Hot" in a range of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400 to 425F, though the recipe gives no figure. The instruction about the greatest heat at the bottom is advice for a range oven with a single fire below; in a modern oven, bake on the lowest rack, ideally on a preheated sheet pan, to set the bottom crust of a wet filling.
- Add the yolks off the heatThe recipe is explicit that the cornstarch mixture must cool before the lemon and yolks go in, and it matters. Hot starch will scramble the yolks, and adding acidic lemon juice to hot cornstarch thins the set.
- Browning the meringueA brief pass under high heat colours the top but leaves the interior of the meringue barely warm, which is why old lemon pies weep and slip. Spread the meringue over filling that is still hot, seal it to the crust all round, and give it long enough that the meringue is cooked through, not just tanned.
- YieldOne pie; the plate size is not given, but the quantities suit a 9-inch, 6 to 8 slices. Cool completely before cutting; a single-tablespoon cornstarch filling will run if served warm.
Lemon fillings thickened with cornstarch and crowned with the beaten whites left over from the yolks belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, when cheap refined cornstarch and reliable box ovens made the two-part pie practical for home cooks; the pairing is often traced back to Philadelphia pastry teaching of the earlier 1800s, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. What is certain is the economy of the thing: two eggs do double duty, the yolks enriching and setting the curd, the whites capping it, with nothing thrown away.