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Lemon Pie. Best Hotel Kind
1 pound of white sugar. 5 lemons. 1 quart of water or milk. 2 ounces of corn starch. 15 yolks of eggs-or 8 whole eggs. 1 ounce of butter. Put the sugar in a saucepan, grate in the lemon rinds--the yellow only--and squeeze in the juice without the bitter seeds. Pour in the water and set the saucepan on to boil. Mix the 2 tablespoonfuls of starch with a little cold water, pour it into the saucepan when the syrup is boiling and immediately take it off the fire. Then mix in the yolks slightly beaten--and the butter. They are not to be cooked in it. Bake in pie pans lined with puff--paste rolled out thin. Sift powdered sugar over the pies when done, or else meringue over with the white of eggs and sugar.
Can one advocate simplicity and short bills of fare and a few things well cooked, and then give six ways of making lemon pies and other things similar? Yes. Not for one person to make the same thing six ways so much as for six persons to pick out the method that suits their particular circumstances and style of table they cook for. And as with pie mixture so with many other things in this book. For the cheapest covered lemon pie of the great bakeries.
A hotel-scale lemon custard baked in the shell rather than a stovetop curd poured into a blind-baked crust. Written for a pastry bench turning out several pies at once, so the first job is deciding how many you want.
- YieldA quart of liquid plus a pound of sugar and 15 yolks makes roughly three to four 9-inch pies. For a single pie, quarter everything: 1 cup liquid, 4 oz sugar, 4 yolks, a scant tablespoon of cornstarch, a teaspoon of butter, and the zest and juice of about one and a quarter lemons.
- The cornstarch is contradictoryThe ingredient list says 2 ounces, the method says 2 tablespoonfuls. Two ounces by weight is nearer six or seven tablespoons. Two tablespoons per quart will set only loosely once the eggs are counted in; three to four tablespoons per quart is the safer reading if you want a sliceable pie, but the original is genuinely ambiguous here.
- The hinge: the yolks are not cooked on the stove"They are not to be cooked in it" is the whole technique. The starch is scalded and the pan comes straight off the heat, then the yolks go in warm, not hot. If the syrup is still boiling when the yolks arrive they will scramble and the filling will be grainy. Let it stop bubbling first, and temper a ladleful into the beaten yolks before combining.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Set it hot to start so the bottom crust sets, around 425F for the first 10 minutes, then drop to 325-350F until the centre is just barely wobbly, about 25-35 minutes more. The custard is done well before it looks firm; carryover heat finishes it.
- Puff paste under a wet custardRolled thin and filled raw, puff paste soaks. Chill the lined pans hard, dock the base, and consider a partial blind bake despite the original instruction. Modern all-butter puff will serve here, though this page does not say what fat Whitehead intended.
- Water or milkWater gives a sharper, cleaner filling; milk gives an opaque custard closer to a lemon cream. Milk plus this much lemon juice may look curdled as it heats.
- Whites left overFifteen yolks leaves fifteen whites. The recipe's own suggestion, meringue, uses them at roughly 1 oz (2 tablespoons) sugar per white for a soft pie meringue; beat to stiff peaks and brown at 400F for a few minutes.
- "White sugar" and "powdered sugar"White sugar is ordinary granulated. "Powdered sugar" in this period means a finely ground sugar, not necessarily as fine as what is now sold as confectioners' or icing sugar; sift it over the finished pies.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men who ran American hotel and restaurant kitchens in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and this entry shows the audience plainly: quantities in pounds and quarts, eggs counted by the dozen, and a closing note that the same book offers six lemon pies because six different cooks will pick the method that suits their particular circumstances and style of table. Lemon pie was a fixture of the hotel bill of fare precisely because it was cheap in materials and impressive on the plate, the expense sitting in the eggs rather than in any imported ingredient. The instruction to grate "the yellow only" and keep out the bitter seeds is the standard nineteenth-century caution against pith and pip, both sources of the bitterness that ruins a lemon filling. The closing fragment, "For the cheapest covered lemon pie of the great bakeries," appears to point onward to a further recipe, and is a reminder that commercial baking at scale already existed alongside hotel work.