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Cheap Lemon Custard
3 eggs. 1 1/2 cups sugar. 1 tablespoon butter. 1 tablespoon cornstarch in 3 tablespoons milk. 2 lemons. Make meringue of whites. Enough for two pies.
This is a shorthand note rather than a full method — Mrs. Wilson's readers were expected to know how a lemon pie filling behaves. A few things have to be supplied before it will work.
- The missing liquidThree eggs, a tablespoon of butter and three tablespoons of milk will not fill two pies, so a liquid, water or milk, appears to have been left out. How much cannot be recovered from the text, and the single tablespoon of cornstarch would thicken only a modest amount of it. Treat the quantity as genuinely unstated.
- Split the sugarThe recipe does not say how the sugar is divided, but 1 1/2 cups is probably meant to cover the whole dessert rather than the filling alone. On that reading, reserve about 2 tablespoons per egg white for the meringue and put the rest in the custard.
- The hinge: gentle heatCombine the cornstarch slurry with the sweetened liquid and cook until thick, then temper the beaten yolks into it off the heat before returning it briefly to the pan. Dropping yolks straight into a boiling starch base gives you scrambled egg in lemon syrup.
- LemonsExpect roughly 1/3 cup juice from two lemons plus the zest of both; add the juice at the end, since acid weakens cornstarch that is held at a boil.
- Yield and pan size"Two pies" presumably means two shells baked blind and cooled. Because the liquid quantity is missing, no reliable modern pan equivalent can be given.
- MeringueBeat the three whites to soft peaks, add the reserved sugar a spoonful at a time, spread it so it seals to the crust edge all round, and bake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes until the peaks colour.
Mrs. Wilson was writing during and just after the First World War, when sugar, butter and eggs were all under pressure, and the word "cheap" in her titles reads as a selling point rather than an apology. The economy here is the cornstarch: a true lemon custard leans on yolks for body, while a starch-thickened filling stretches three eggs across two pies and uses the whites over the top so nothing is wasted. Cornstarch lemon pies of this kind are generally traced to the second half of the nineteenth century, after commercial corn starch became cheap and widely available in American groceries, and they anticipate the lemon meringue pie made from a box today. The terseness of the entry is characteristic of the compressed, running-prose style in which such recipes were set.