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Lemon Pie
1 Cup Yellow Corn Syrup 1 Cup Milk 2 Tablespoons Cornstarch 3 Eggs Grated Rind and Juice of 1 Large Lemon Pinch of Salt Cook the syrup, milk and cornstarch together in a double boiler for fifteen minutes. Beat the yolks of two eggs and one whole egg slightly and stir smooth with the first mixture. Add the lemon juice and rind of the lemon and the salt, and cook one minute. Fill the paste while hot and bake in a quick oven.
When cool make meringue of the whites of the two eggs, and return to the oven to brown.
A corn-syrup lemon filling rather than the usual sugar-and-water sort, which makes it sweeter, glossier and rather more forgiving. Two things need translating: the oven heat and the fact that the pastry goes in raw.
- Yellow corn syrupThis is light or golden corn syrup (the "yellow" of the period distinguished it from the refined "crystal white"). Do not substitute dark corn syrup, which will bully the lemon, and do not use high-fructose syrup or golden syrup, which behave differently in sweetness and set.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. That heat is for the raw pastry shell, which is filled hot and baked from raw so the crust sets before the custard soaks in. Twenty to twenty-five minutes, until the pastry edge is coloured and the centre barely trembles.
- Browning the meringueReturn it to a much cooler oven than the pie was baked in -- 325-350F for 12-15 minutes -- or the peaks will scorch before the meringue cooks through. Spread it so it touches the crust all round, which is what keeps it from shrinking inward.
- The meringue has no sugar listedEither an omission or a step the book assumed the cook knew. If sweetening it, two whites want about 4 tablespoons of sugar, added a spoonful at a time once the whites are frothy.
- Add the lemon last, and brieflyThe one minute after the lemon goes in is deliberate. Acid breaks down gelatinised cornstarch, so a long cook after the juice is added will thin a filling that had already thickened properly.
- Double boiler timingFifteen minutes over simmering water is right for cornstarch that never comes to a true boil; stir often, and judge by feel -- the mixture should coat the spoon thickly before the eggs go in.
- Tempering the eggs"Stir smooth with the first mixture" is best done gradually: pour a little of the hot starch mixture into the beaten eggs first, then return the lot to the pan. Tipping cold eggs into hot starch gives you threads of cooked yolk.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Cool it completely before cutting; a corn-syrup filling stays soft while warm.
Corn syrup in a lemon pie is the signature of the early twentieth century, when refiners were pressing home cooks to use glucose syrup in place of cane sugar -- a campaign that intensified during the sugar shortages of the First World War, when household books were full of "sugar-saving" desserts. The dish itself descends from the older lemon custard tarts of English cookery; the meringue lid, made from the whites left over after the yolks went into the filling, is often said to have spread widely in American pie-making through the second half of the nineteenth century and is a piece of straightforward thrift as much as decoration.