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Lemon Pie with Cornstarch
This is baked with one crust. To make one pie, use one lemon; one tablespoon of butter; one and one-half tablespoon of cornstarch; one cup of water; one egg (white only); sugar to taste. Wet the cornstarch in a PUMPKIN PIE WITH COTTAGE BALLS AND STRAINED HONEY
The text breaks off mid-sentence where the page turned, so the method has to be reconstructed from the ingredient list. The proportions are those of a small single-crust cornstarch lemon pie of the type common around 1900.
- The recipe is incompleteThe instruction stops at "Wet the cornstarch in a" — the remainder of the line was lost to a page break, and the words that follow belong to a different recipe entirely. Standard practice of the period was to slake the cornstarch in a little cold water, then stir it into the rest of the water brought to a boil, cooking until thick and clear.
- QuantityOne cup of water, one egg white and 1½ tablespoons cornstarch make a shallow filling, probably about enough for a 7- to 8-inch shell, though the book never says what size pan it assumed. For a modern 9-inch pan the amounts would want increasing.
- "Sugar to taste"The book leaves the quantity to the cook. For one lemon's juice and zest in a cup of water, something in the region of ½ to ⅔ cup is a reasonable starting point; much less and the filling is punishing.
- The egg whiteOnly the white is called for, and it is not clear from the surviving text whether it goes into the filling or onto it. If it is intended as a meringue — beaten stiff with a little sugar and spread over the cooled filling — it would be browned in a hot oven, in modern terms around 400°F for 8 to 10 minutes. The book gives no temperature.
- Baked with one crustIf the cornstarch mixture is cooked through on the stove, as the surviving words suggest, the shell will need to be baked blind before filling. Line, weight, and bake at around 400°F until dry and pale gold — the temperature is a modern equivalent, not the book's.
- The butterBest stirred in off the heat once the cornstarch has thickened; fat added earlier can coat the starch grains and slow the gelling.
- Lemon lastAcid weakens cornstarch. Add the juice after the mixture has thickened and stop cooking soon after, or the filling slackens and weeps in the shell.
- YieldPerhaps six modest slices, assuming an 8-inch pie; the recipe says only "one pie." Serve at room temperature — the filling cuts cleanly only once fully cooled.
Cornstarch lemon pie is the thrifty cousin of lemon meringue, and the book's inclusion of it says a good deal about turn-of-the-century economy: one lemon, one egg white, and a spoonful of butter stretched by starch and water into a whole dessert. Commercial cornstarch had been manufactured in the United States since the middle of the nineteenth century and was widely advertised as a cheap, reliable thickener, which put pies like this one within reach of households that could not spare four or five eggs for a custard. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published cookery and domestic manuals alongside its magazines, aimed at much the same reader. The collision at the end of this entry, where the pumpkin pie heading runs into the lemon pie method, looks like an artifact of how the page has been transcribed or reprinted rather than anything in the cooking.