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Club House Lemon Pie
20 ounces of sugar. 9 large lemons. 1 1/2 pints of rich cream. 18 yolks of eggs. 6 whites.
Place the sugar in a large bowl and grate the lemon rinds into it, using a tin grater, and then squeeze in the juice. Beat the yolks of eggs light and mix the cream with them; pour this to the lemon and sugar, and just before filling the pie crusts with the mixture whip the 6 whites to a froth and stir them in, No meringue needed for this rich acid kind.
A hotel-scale lemon custard pie: no thickener but eggs, no meringue, and — as printed — no baking directions at all. The quantities assume a professional pastry bench.
- Scale and yieldTwenty ounces of sugar, 9 lemons, 3 cups of cream and 18 yolks with 6 whites will fill something like three to five 9-inch pies, depending how deep the shells are. Divide by four for a single pie: 5 oz (about 3/4 cup) sugar, 2 large lemons, 3/4 cup cream, 4-5 yolks and 1-2 whites.
- Weight, not volume20 ounces of sugar is a weight — about 2 3/4 cups granulated. Pints in an American book of this period are 16 fl oz, so 1 1/2 pints is 3 cups.
- Blind-bake the shellsThe filling is thin and very wet. Line and partly bake the crusts before filling, or the bottom will never set. The recipe says nothing either way.
- OvenNo temperature is given. An egg custard of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, until the centre still wobbles slightly — roughly 35-45 minutes for a 9-inch pie. Higher heat curdles it and weeps.
- Acid and creamCombine the lemon juice with the sugar first, as directed, and add the cream only with the beaten yolks. Cream met with neat lemon juice can curdle in the bowl.
- The whites go in lastWhipping the 6 whites and folding them in immediately before filling is the whole texture of the dish — it lightens a mixture that would otherwise bake dense. Whipped early, they collapse and the point is lost.
- Grating the rindThe recipe specifies a tin grater; a microplane does it better. Take the yellow only, and grate directly into the sugar so the oils are caught.
- Leftover whitesTwelve whites are left over. At home, freeze them.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the working pastry departments of American hotels, clubs and restaurants in the late nineteenth century, which is why his measures come in pints and pounds and his batches in dozens of eggs. The note that no meringue is needed "for this rich acid kind" suggests a division in period lemon pies — a custard set with eighteen eggs and three cups of cream was evidently thought to stand on its own.