Home › Pastry and Pies › Lemon Meringue Pie
Lemon Meringue Pie
2 cups water 3 tablespoons corn starch 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup sugar 3 eggs 4 tablespoons lemon juice 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind 1 teaspoon salt Line pie plate with pastry and bake about 10 minutes or until very light brown. In the meantime, put water on to boil; mix corn starch, flour and sugar with 1/2 cup cold water until smooth; separate eggs; add yolks to corn starch, flour and sugar; mix well and add slowly to boiling water. Cook 5 minutes, stirring constantly; add lemon juice, rind and salt. Pour into baked crust. Beat whites of eggs until light; add 3 tablespoons of sugar and spread over top. Dust with sugar and brown in oven.
A straightforward cornstarch-and-flour lemon filling of the type that dominated American pie baking once cornstarch became a pantry staple. Two things in the original need attention before you start: the salt and the vagueness of "brown in oven."
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintThe salt -- One full teaspoon of salt in a sweet lemon filling is more than most modern palates will accept. Reduce to about 1/4 teaspoon if you want it to read as a seasoning rather than a flavour.
- Water totalThe 2 cups is boiled; a further 1/2 cup cold water is used to slake the starch mixture, so the finished filling contains about 2 1/2 cups liquid. The recipe does not state a pan size; that volume suits a deep 9-inch plate, though the thickener is on the light side for it.
- Blind baking"About 10 minutes or until very light brown" implies a fairly hot oven; the usual modern equivalent is around 425F. The recipe says nothing about weights, but lining the shell with parchment and weights will stop the sides slumping. Ten minutes gives a pale, set shell that finishes browning while the meringue colors.
- Adding the yolk-starch mixtureThe hinge of the recipe. Add it to the boiling water in a slow stream while whisking hard, or the yolks scramble and the starch lumps. Some cooks prefer to reverse it and temper the hot water into the starch mixture, then return everything to the pan.
- Cook the starch out fullyFive minutes of constant stirring at a bare simmer is not excessive; underbooked cornstarch tastes chalky and sets loosely. The lemon juice goes in at the end, off the heat, because prolonged boiling with acid weakens cornstarch and the filling can turn runny.
- MeringueThree whites with 3 tablespoons of sugar is a soft, old-fashioned meringue. Beat to soft peaks, add the sugar gradually, and spread it so it seals to the crust all the way round, which is what prevents shrinking and weeping. Spread it while the filling is still hot.
- Browning"Brown in oven" is left entirely to the cook. Modern practice is roughly 350F for 12 to 15 minutes for an evenly set meringue, or a hot oven for 4 to 5 minutes for a darker, softer one; the lower, longer bake cooks the whites through rather than merely coloring them.
- Yield and coolingThe quantities suggest one 9-inch pie, six to eight slices, though the recipe does not say. Cool at room temperature before cutting -- three hours or so -- since a starch-set filling needs the time to firm, and refrigerating it while warm tends to draw water out of the meringue.
Lemon meringue pie in this form belongs to the era when cornstarch reached American kitchens in quantity, from the 1840s onward, giving cooks a cheap, reliable thickener that set clear and let the lemon read bright rather than muddy the way a heavy egg custard does. Earlier lemon puddings and "lemon cheesecakes" leaned on eggs and butter alone; the starch-thickened filling with a separate meringue cap, using the whites left over from the yolks in the filling, is a thrifty piece of engineering that made the pie a fixture of church suppers and bakery counters alike. Its appearance in a promotional cookbook of this kind is typical of the genre: such books were given away or sold cheaply by manufacturers, and they filled out the pages around the leavened cakes and biscuits with the standard repertoire a housewife would expect to find, whether or not the product appeared in the ingredient list.