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Squash Soufflé Pie
little of the water, and place the rest of the water over the fire in a saucepan; when the latter boils stir into it the wet cornstarch, and boil a minute after it thickens. Add the butter, and set the mixture aside to cool. Line a pie plate with paste, and when the filling has cooled add to it the lemon juice, the grated rind, and sugar to sweeten. Beat the mixture well, turn it into the crust, and bake about twenty minutes in a very quick oven. When done, spread over the top of the pie the beaten white of egg, sweetened with a teaspoon of sugar and flavored with a little lemon extract. Brown the meringue, and serve the pie cold.
The text on this page is a fragment: it opens mid-sentence and belongs to a cornstarch lemon pie with meringue rather than to anything containing squash, so the heading and the method have parted company somewhere in the typesetting. Treat it as a working method for a boiled-starch lemon pie and supply the quantities yourself.
- Missing ingredient listThe opening lines that named the water, cornstarch, butter, sugar and lemon are gone. A 9-inch pie of this type might take something like 1 1/2 cups water, 4 tablespoons cornstarch, 1 tablespoon butter, the juice and grated rind of 1 large lemon, roughly 1 cup sugar, and 1 egg white for the meringue -- but these are a modern reconstruction, not the book's figures, and the surviving text mentions no yolk.
- "A very quick oven"The hot end of the old scale, usually read as somewhere around 450F. That is hot for a filled pie, and it works because the filling has already been cooked and thickened on the stove.
- Wet the cornstarch firstThis is the hinge. The starch must be slaked to a smooth slurry in a little cold water before it meets the boiling pan, or it will seize into lumps that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- Boil a full minute after thickeningUndercooked cornstarch tastes chalky and, worse, will weep in the shell. A minute at a genuine boil, stirred constantly, is the minimum.
- Add the lemon off the heatAcid degrades cornstarch when hot, so a filling soured while still on the stove can thin. The book cools the mixture before the juice and rind go in; it does not say why.
- Blind-bake the shellTwenty minutes in a very hot oven over an unbaked crust with a wet filling on top gives a soggy base by modern standards. Line and bake the pastry until dry and pale gold, then fill.
- The meringueOne white sweetened with a single teaspoon of sugar is a thin, old-fashioned glaze rather than the tall meringue of later recipes. Spread it to touch the crust edge all round, and brown it at 400F for a few minutes or under a low broiler with the door open.
- YieldThe recipe says only "a pie plate" and gives no size or number of servings; a 9-inch plate is a reasonable modern default. Serve cold, as directed, and refrigerate any that is kept.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine house behind The Delineator, and like most publisher-issued household books of its day it was assembled from many hands. The pie itself belongs to a family of American "boiled" lemon pies that spread in the second half of the nineteenth century, once cheap refined cornstarch made it possible to thicken a filling on the stove instead of relying on eggs alone. Cornstarch was manufactured in quantity in the United States from the 1840s onward and marketed hard to housekeepers as an economy: one lemon, a spoonful of butter and a few cents of starch, with the single spare egg white whipped up on top so that nothing was wasted.