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Lemon Pie
1 cup boiling water 1 tablespoon cornstarch 1 tablespoon cold water 1 cup sugar 1/4 cup butter 1 egg Juice and rind of 1 lemon Put the water into small saucepan and add cornstarch stirred smooth in cold water; when it boils after stirring, set off the stove and add butter and sugar, previously well stirred together. When cool add egg and lemon. Pour into crust in pan and remove to cooker, using both radiators. This will bake in twenty minutes. After baking, cover with meringue and place in the cabinet to brown, again using both radiators.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the pie is not baked over heat but set into an insulated box between preheated metal or soapstone discs. Everything below assumes you will be using a conventional oven instead.
- "Both radiators"A fireless cooker was an insulated box; its "radiators" were soapstone or cast-iron discs heated on the range until nearly red and packed above and below the food. Using both means top and bottom heat, which is the box's approximation of an oven — the whole apparatus is what a modern oven replaces.
- Translating to an ovenRetained-heat cooking runs at a falling temperature and is not reproducible by a fixed oven setting. Treat this as a stirred filling in a pre-baked shell: cook the starch mixture through on the stove, pour into a blind-baked crust, and bake only long enough to set the egg, around 350F.
- The hinge: let it cool before the eggThe instruction to add the egg only when the mixture has cooled is the one step that cannot be skipped. Beaten into hot cornstarch it curdles into threads, and a filling this thin gives you nowhere to hide them.
- MeasurementsA quarter cup of butter is 4 tablespoons; one medium lemon gives roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of juice and about a tablespoon of grated zest. Grate the rind before you cut the lemon.
- A soft setOne tablespoon of cornstarch and one egg to a cup of water is a slack, almost saucy filling by modern standards, closer to a lemon butter than to the stiff cornerstone slices of a diner lemon meringue. Expect it to spread a little when cut.
- MeringueThe recipe uses the whole egg in the filling, so the meringue needs whites you have not yet accounted for — two whites beaten with about 4 tablespoons of sugar covers a single pie. Browning in the fireless cabinet is slow and pale; a hot oven or broiler for a few minutes does it faster and better.
- YieldEnough filling for one 8-inch shell, serving six modest slices.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American kitchens in the first decades of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period routinely carried a chapter of it. The principle was old — food brought to temperature on the range, then buried in an insulated box of hay, felt or mineral wool to finish on its own stored heat — and the appeal was fuel economy and a stove that did not have to be tended, which mattered a great deal in coal- and wood-burning households and mattered again during the food and fuel conservation campaigns of the First World War. Baking was the hard case: a hay box will hold a stew at temperature for hours but cannot brown anything, which is why manufacturers sold the heated soapstone or iron "radiators" this recipe calls for. Lemon pie is a shrewd thing to attempt in such a cooker, since the filling is essentially cooked before it goes in and the box only has to set it. The pale meringue that resulted was the standing complaint against fireless baking, and the recipe's slightly hopeful "place in the cabinet to brown" is a fair record of the device's limits.