Lemon Pie
One pie: 1 lemon. 1 cup sugar. 1/2 cup seeded raisins. Grated rind of 1/2 a lemon. 1 tablespoon flour. 1 tablespoon butter.
Cook over fire until thick, then add raisins. Bake pastry and put in filling. Roll thin pastry for top. Can make roll instead of pie and serve with lemon sauce.
A one-pie filling written in Mrs. Wilson's usual shorthand, with two real gaps: no liquid is named and the assembly order is printed backwards. Read the points before you start.
- The missing liquidAs written, the juice of one lemon plus a cup of sugar and a tablespoon of flour will scorch long before it thickens. Fillings of this type generally take water added to the juice, and about a cup is a workable amount; the original genuinely does not say, so treat the quantity as your judgement rather than the book's.
- The assembly order"Bake pastry and put in filling. Roll thin pastry for top" most likely describes a bottom shell part-baked, filled and then lidded rather than a fully baked crust, though the wording will bear either reading. Line a pie pan, set the crust, fill with the cooled thickened mixture, cover with a thin top crust, seal and vent.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A double-crust pie of this kind wants a hot start to set the top pastry, around 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 350F until the crust colours through, roughly 25 to 30 minutes more.
- Cook the flour outThe hinge of the recipe is the stovetop stage. Whisk the flour into the sugar dry, then add liquid and juice, and hold it at a bare simmer a full two minutes after it thickens or the filling tastes pasty. Stir the butter in off the heat.
- Raisins go in lastThe recipe adds them after thickening; raisins stirred in early can swell and loosen the starch, though the book gives no reason for the order. "Seeded" means the seeds were picked out by hand; modern seedless raisins answer the same purpose. Half a cup needs no soaking.
- Grated rindTake the zest before you juice the lemon, and take only the yellow. The recipe calls for the rind of half a lemon against the juice of a whole one, which is a restrained amount for this much sugar.
- The roll variationRolled as a jelly-roll-style pastry, the filling should be cooled and stiff or it will run out at the ends. The book does not say what the lemon sauce is; a simple thickened lemon sauce rather than a curd is the likelier intention.
- YieldOne pie; the book gives no pan size or serving count. It is sweet enough that smaller wedges are more welcome than larger ones.
This appears in a book published in 1920, when Mary A. Wilson was still writing in the idiom of wartime household economy: a pie that gets its body from flour and raisins rather than the several eggs a lemon meringue would demand. Raisin pies of exactly this shape, sometimes with lemon and sometimes with vinegar, were a fixture of Pennsylvania German kitchens around Philadelphia, where Wilson worked, and the raisin version is traditionally called funeral pie or Rosina pie — the usual explanation, often repeated though not documented, being that dried fruit and pantry staples could be assembled at short notice in any season. What the recipe really records is the older habit of thickening sweet fillings with a spoonful of flour and a spoonful of butter, a technique that predates cornstarch's dominance in American dessert cookery.