Orange Pie
Grated rind and juice of two oranges, four eggs, four table-spoons sugar, and one of butter; cream the butter and sugar, add the beaten eggs, then the rind and juice of the oranges, and, lastly, the whites beaten to a froth, and mixed in lightly. Bake with an under crust. Gov. Stearns, Florida.
A custard pie in the old style: no milk, no flour, no thickener beyond eggs, so the oranges carry the whole thing. Two readings of the egg instruction are possible, and the sugar is very low by modern taste.
- The egg ambiguityIt calls for four eggs, then says to fold in "the whites" at the end. The sensible reading is four yolks beaten into the butter and sugar, with the four whites whipped and folded last. Read literally it would mean eight eggs, four whole and four separated, which would be unusual for a pie of this type.
- Sugar is the real problemFour tablespoons is about a quarter cup against the juice of two oranges. By current expectations the filling will read as sharp; many cooks will want half a cup or more.
- The hinge: do not let it boilThis is an egg custard with no starch to protect it. The original specifies no oven temperature; a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, baked until the centre is just set with a slight wobble, suits it. If the filling bubbles at the edges the eggs curdle and the pie weeps into the crust.
- "Bake with an under crust"One crust only, no lid. Blind-bake the shell until dry and pale gold before filling, or the wet citrus mixture will soak it. Line and weight it, then remove the weights for the last few minutes.
- Quantity and panFour eggs' worth of filling suits an 8- or 9-inch shallow pie plate of the period. In a deep modern 9-inch dish the layer will look thin; that is correct for this style rather than a fault.
- The butterA single tablespoon in the whole pie. It is there for richness and mouthfeel, not structure, so creaming it with that little sugar takes moments. Have it genuinely soft.
- ZestGrate only the coloured outer layer. The white pith on two oranges' worth of rind is enough to turn the filling bitter, and there is not much sugar here to mask it.
- ServingCool completely before cutting. Warm, an unthickened citrus custard slumps; chilled it slices cleanly. Six modest wedges.
Orange pies of this kind — juice, rind, eggs, a scrap of butter, baked in an open shell — are the citrus cousins of the lemon pie that fills so many American cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, and both are generally traced to far older English lemon and orange "cheesecakes" and custard tarts. What makes this one worth noticing is the credit line. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and published in the early 1880s, gathered contributions from prominent Southern households, and the attribution to "Gov. Stearns, Florida" most likely points to Marcellus L. Stearns, who served as governor of Florida in the mid-1870s, though the identification is an inference. Attaching a name and a state to a recipe is often said to have been the compiler's way of vouching for it, and here the state does double duty: Florida citrus was moving north by rail and steamer in exactly these years, and a pie built on the juice and rind of two whole oranges was still, for most of the country, a small luxury worth advertising.