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Lemon Cream Pie
Make a good pie crust and prick bottom. Put one cup sugar and one cup water in a saucepan and let come to a boil. Mix one tablespoon cornstarch in a little water and add to water and sugar on stove. When thick take off stove and add a small chunk of butter; stir it up.
Stir in the yolks of two eggs and grated rind and juice of one lemon. Beat whites of two eggs until thick and spread over pie when cooked; then put in oven to brown.
A stovetch cornstarch filling with a meringue lid, written for a cook who already knew how to blind-bake a shell. Two things need attention: the starch is on the light side, and the yolks are stirred into an off-heat pan.
- Prick and bake the shell first"Prick bottom" implies the crust is docked and baked before filling, though the recipe gives no oven setting or time; use your usual blind-baking method. The filling is cooked on the stove and the pie returns to the oven only long enough to brown the meringue, so an unbaked shell would not cook through.
- The starch is minimalOne tablespoon of cornstarch to a cup of water plus a lemon's juice gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a sliceable one. Two to three tablespoons is standard in modern lemon cream fillings if you want clean wedges.
- Cook the yolksThe original stirs yolks into a pan taken off the stove. Return the pan to low heat after adding them and cook, stirring, for two full minutes until it thickens again and loses any starchy taste. This also brings the eggs to a safe temperature, which residual pan heat alone will not reliably do.
- Acid goes in lastLemon juice thins cornstarch if it boils with it. Adding the juice and rind at the end, as written, is correct — do not let the filling return to a hard boil afterwards.
- "A small chunk of butter"Read this as one to two tablespoons. It is there for gloss and mouthfeel, not structure.
- The meringue needs sugarWhites beaten "until thick" with nothing added will weep and slide. Beat in two tablespoons of sugar per white once soft peaks form, then spread the meringue so it touches the crust rim all the way round to anchor it.
- Oven to brownThe recipe gives no temperature or time; a moderate oven, watched, for a few minutes is enough to colour the meringue. Spread the meringue while the filling is still hot; that helps the underside set.
- Yield and servingThe recipe names no tin size; this quantity of filling suits a small pie of roughly eight to nine inches. Cool at room temperature before cutting -- chilling a meringue pie in the refrigerator tends to make the topping bead with moisture.
Cornstarch-thickened lemon pies became common in American home baking in the second half of the nineteenth century, once boxed cornstarch was cheap and lemons could be shipped inland by rail. Older English lemon tarts generally relied on eggs and butter alone; a starch-bound sugar syrup stretched two eggs across a whole pie. The meringue lid uses the whites left over from the yolks in the filling, and pies of this kind are now generally called lemon meringue pie, though the name is not used here.