Lemon Pie
1½ tablespoons corn-starch
I lemon
1 cup water
1 egg-white
1 tablespoon butter
I to 3 tablespoons sugar
1 cup sugar
Mix the corn-starch in a little of the cold water and bring the rest of the water to the boiling-point. Add the moistened cornstarch and cook until transparent. Add the butter, sugar, lemonjuice and grated rind and set aside to cool. Beat the mixture well and turn into a baked crust. Make a meringue with the stiffly beaten white of egg and sugar. Brown the meringue and serve the pie cold.
A thrift version of lemon pie: the filling is thickened with cornstarch alone, with no yolks, and the single egg white goes on top. The ingredient list as printed runs together in two columns, which is worth sorting out before you start.
- Reading the ingredient listTwo amounts of sugar are given, and the recipe does not say which is which; the sense of it is that the 1 cup sweetens the filling and the 1 to 3 tablespoons goes into the meringue. The capital "I" appears twice in the original and is in both places the numeral 1 — one lemon, 1 to 3 tablespoons sugar.
- Cook the starch until it clearsThe instruction to cook "until transparent" is the hinge. A cornstarch paste that still looks milky will taste chalky and can thin out again as it stands; keep it at a bare simmer, stirring, for a minute or two past the point it turns glossy and translucent.
- Add the lemon off the heatThe recipe adds juice and rind after cooking, and that order matters. Acid breaks down cornstarch's thickening power if it boils with it, so let the paste finish, then stir in butter, sugar, juice and zest.
- Expect a soft setA tablespoon and a half of cornstarch to one cup of water gives a filling that mounds but does not slice cleanly like a modern yolk-thickened curd. If you want firm wedges, this is not that pie; chill it thoroughly and accept a spoonable center.
- Pan sizeThe recipe names no dish. One cup of liquid plus the sugar makes a modest amount of filling, best suited to a small shell of about 7 or 8 inches; a 9-inch pan will look shallow, and one egg white will not cover it with meringue to any depth.
- Browning the meringueThe recipe gives no oven temperature. In modern practice a meringue browns at around 350F in something like 12 to 15 minutes, or in a good deal less time in a hotter oven. Spread the meringue so it touches the crust all the way around, which stops it shrinking into an island.
- Serve cold, as directedThe filling needs several hours of thorough chilling to set before it is cut.
- YieldSix modest slices from an 8-inch pie.
Cornstarch lemon pie belongs to a large family of turn-of-the-century American "economy" desserts built on commercial cornstarch, which by the 1890s was sold cheaply in boxes and heavily promoted for puddings and pie fillings. The point of a recipe like this one is that it uses a single egg — the white for meringue, no yolks at all — at a time when eggs were seasonal and priced accordingly, and when a lemon and a cup of sugar could carry the whole flavor of the dish. Recipes of this kind were written for exactly the reader who wanted a company dessert from pantry staples. The richer version with two or three yolks stirred into the hot starch, which is what most people now mean by lemon meringue pie, was already known but cost more to make.