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Lemon Cream Pie
4 eggs 2 heaping tablespoons flour The grated rind and juice of 2 lemons 1 cup sugar 1½ cups boiling water Pie Paste No. 2 Beat yolks and whites of eggs separately. To beaten yolks add sugar, flour, lemon juice and rind, and lastly boiling water. Cook in a double boiler and when it begins to thicken, add to it one-half of beaten whites. Stir this in thoroughly and let it cook until it is as thick as desired.
Use the remainder of the egg whites for the meringue on top of pie. After your custard has cooled, fill a baked shell of pie paste No. 2, pile meringue on top, and bake in a very slow oven until the meringue is brown. (See illustration, page 51.)
A stirred lemon custard cooked over water, poured into a pre-baked shell and finished with meringue. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for eggs and flour, but neither appears in the ingredient list. Neither the number of eggs nor the amount of flour can be recovered from the page; a filling on 1 cup sugar and 1 1/2 cups water would take roughly two or three eggs and a few tablespoons of flour, but this is a reconstruction, not the book's figure.
- Measurements as given1 cup sugar, 1 1/2 cups boiling water, and the grated rind and juice of 2 lemons, which is roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup juice depending on size.
- "Very slow oven"The lowest of the old graded ovens, somewhere in the region of 250 to 300F. At that temperature the meringue dries and colours slowly; browning will take considerably longer than in a hot oven.
- Double boiler, not direct heatThe flour-thickened custard scorches and curdles easily over a burner. Keep the water below a boil and stir constantly until the mixture coats the spoon heavily.
- Adding the whitesHalf the beaten whites go into the custard once it begins to thicken, and it is then cooked on until thick as desired. Stir until no streaks remain.
- Cool before fillingThe instruction to cool the custard matters: hot filling in a baked shell soaks the pastry. Cool to at least room temperature, and cover the surface so no skin forms.
- Meringue on a cool fillingSpread the meringue so it touches the crust all around the rim. This anchors it and keeps it from sliding as the pie sets.
- YieldOne pie; the book gives no pan size or serving count. Cut with a wet knife and eat the day it is made; meringue deteriorates on standing.
Lemon pies thickened with flour or cornstarch and crowned with meringue became a fixture of American home baking in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period in which cheap refined sugar, improving ovens and imported citrus were all coming within reach of an ordinary household. The cross-reference to "Pie Paste No. 2" and to a photographic illustration is characteristic of early twentieth-century community and promotional cookbooks, which assumed a reader working through the book in order rather than dipping into a single page. The trick of folding part of the beaten whites into the hot custard, rather than saving them all for the top, was a common thrift: it stretched a small number of eggs into both a fuller filling and a meringue.