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Another (One lemon one tablespoonful)
One lemon, one tablespoonful corn starch, butter the size of an egg, one teacup of sugar, one teacup water; bake as above.
A short eggless lemon pie filling, given as a variation on the recipe above it in the book — meaning it is poured into an unbaked or part-baked pastry shell and finished in the oven. The proportions work, but the original assumes you know how cornstarch behaves.
- Cook the starch firstCornstarch will not thicken reliably if it simply sits in a pie shell in the oven. Whisk the starch smooth with the cold water, add sugar, lemon juice and zest, and cook over moderate heat until it thickens and loses its raw chalkiness, then beat in the butter off the heat before filling the shell.
- TeacupA teacup in books of this period is generally smaller than a modern measuring cup; equivalents given range from about 4 to 6 fl oz, so the measure is approximate. Using a full 8 oz cup of each will give a slacker, sweeter filling.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It is there for gloss and richness, not structure.
- One lemonJuice and grated rind both. Lemon size varies; if yours yields less than about 3 tablespoons of juice, use a second one, since the lemon is the only flavour in the dish.
- "Bake as above"The preceding recipe governs the crust and the oven; the book gives no temperature here. Read as a single-crust pie baked until the pastry is coloured and the filling set, and check early if the filling has already been cooked on the stove and the shell blind-baked.
- No eggs, no meringueThis filling has no yolks to set it and nothing to top it. Expect a clear, glossy, almost translucent filling rather than an opaque custard.
- YieldThe quantities make well under two cups of filling, enough for one small or shallow pie rather than a deep 9-inch one.
Recipes like this one mark the moment cornstarch became a staple of the North American pantry. Commercially refined cornstarch is generally traced to the Oswego works of Thomas Kingsford in the 1840s, and by the 1870s it was cheap, shelf-stable and heavily advertised as a thickener for puddings and pie fillings — an attraction in a household where eggs were seasonal and expensive. That is what this recipe really is: a lemon pie built without eggs, relying on starch for body and on butter for the richness the yolks would otherwise supply. The measurement in teacups and "butter the size of an egg" is typical of the compiled community cookbooks of the period, of which The Home Cook Book, published in the 1870s and generally credited as one of the earliest fundraising cookbooks of its kind in North America, is a good example: contributors wrote down what they did, in the vessels they had on the shelf, and assumed the reader had already made a pie.