Lemon Pie II
2 tablespoons corn-starch 2 tablespoons flour 2 egg yolks 3 tablespoons lemon juice Grated rind 1 lemon 1 teaspoon butter Mix corn-starch, flour, and sugar, add boiling water, stirring constantly. Cook two minutes, add butter, egg yolks, and rind and juice of lemon. Line plate with paste same as for Custard Pie. Turn in mixture which has been cooled, and bake until pastry is well browned. Cool slightly, and cover with Meringue I; then return to oven and bake meringue. Yolks 4 eggs 6 tablespoons sugar Few grains salt
A cornstarch-thickened lemon filling baked in a raw shell, then meringued and returned to the oven. Two quantities were lost in the original typesetting, so read the notes before you start.
- Missing quantitiesThe ingredient list as printed gives no amount for sugar or for the boiling water, though both are called for in the method. Comparable lemon fillings of this type use about 1 cup sugar to 1 cup boiling water for a 9-inch pie; treat that as a reconstruction, not the book's own figure.
- The stray last line"Yolks 4 eggs, 6 tablespoons sugar, few grains salt" -- does not match this filling's ingredient list and appears to be a fragment of an adjacent recipe; which one cannot be told from this page. Ignore it here; this filling uses 2 yolks.
- Meringue IThe formula is not printed on this page; in books of this type it is usually the whites of 2 eggs beaten with about 2 tablespoons powdered sugar. Beat the whites to soft peaks before adding sugar, or the sugar weighs them down.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives no oven setting, only "bake until pastry is well browned." As modern guidance rather than the book's own figure: a hot oven of about 425F for roughly 25-30 minutes for the filled shell, then down to about 350F for 12-15 minutes for the meringue, until evenly tan. Too hot an oven browns the peaks before the interior sets and encourages weeping.
- Cook the starch properly"Cook two minutes" means two minutes at a full bubble after it thickens, otherwise the raw-starch taste persists and the filling can thin out later. Add the yolks off the heat and stir them in quickly, and add the lemon juice last so the acid does not sit on hot starch.
- Cool before fillingThe instruction to turn in the mixture "which has been cooled" is the hinge of the recipe. Warm filling poured into raw pastry steams the bottom crust from above, and the base is likely to stay soft.
- Paste same as for Custard PieThat means a single unbaked bottom crust with no upper crust, fitted to the plate with the rim built up. Chill the lined plate while the filling cools.
- Seal the meringueSpread the meringue so it touches the pastry rim all the way round. Meringue that floats free of the edge shrinks inward and leaks syrup as it stands.
- YieldThe book does not state a plate size; the quantities suit a standard pie plate, six to eight servings. Cut with a wet knife once fully cool; the starch filling firms as it chills.
Lemon pie under meringue was a fixture of American cookbooks well before the end of the nineteenth century, and the idea of a lemon custard finished with beaten whites is often traced to Elizabeth Goodfellow's Philadelphia cooking school in the early nineteenth century, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. What dates this particular version is the cornstarch. Commercially refined corn starch became a cheap pantry staple in the second half of the century, and it let cooks thicken a bright, acidic filling with only two yolks instead of the larger number an all-egg lemon custard demanded. The book's habit of numbering variants -- Lemon Pie I, II, Meringue I -- and of cross-referencing pastry to the Custard Pie entry reflects its origins as a teaching text, where a student was expected to have already learned the component before meeting the assembled dish.