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Lemon Pie (II)
Mrs. Carson.
One lemon rind and juice, one cup of sugar, one cup of water, one tablespoon of corn starch cooked in water till thick, three eggs, two of whites saved for frosting, half cup of sugar.
This is a contributor's shorthand rather than a method: an ingredient list with the thickening step buried in the middle. Read it as a cornstarch lemon custard baked in a pre-baked shell, finished with meringue.
- What the amounts add up toOne cup sugar, one cup water, one tablespoon cornstarch, one lemon (rind and juice), and three yolks plus one whole white make enough filling for a single 8- or 9-inch pie. The two reserved whites and the extra half cup of sugar are the meringue.
- The crust is assumedThe recipe never mentions one, and a reader of a book like this would have found pastry directions elsewhere in it. If you treat the filling as stovetop-set and give the pie only a short spell in the oven under the meringue, the shell should be baked blind and fully.
- The hinge: thicken first, eggs secondCook the cornstarch with the sugar and water until it is thick and clear, then take it off the heat before the eggs go anywhere near it. Whisk a ladle of the hot mixture into the beaten yolks, return it all to the pan, and cook it a minute or two more. Dumping yolks into boiling starch gives you scrambled egg in lemon syrup.
- Lemon goes in lastAdd the juice and grated rind off the heat. Acid weakens cornstarch's setting power, so prolonged boiling after the lemon is added can leave the filling slack.
- Rind means zest onlyGrate the yellow outer layer. Nineteenth-century recipes sometimes meant thick-cut peel steeped in the syrup and strained out, but the white pith is bitter either way.
- Meringue proportions and ovenHalf a cup of sugar to two whites is a sweet, soft meringue. Beat to firm peaks and spread it so it touches the crust all round to stop shrinkage. The recipe gives no oven direction; by modern practice, about 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the peaks are lightly coloured, will do it.
- Cooling and servingCornstarch fillings set as they cool; slice only when the pie is fully at room temperature, or the wedges will slump. Six to eight servings, and it does not keep well past a day because the meringue weeps.
Cornstarch lemon pie belongs to the second half of the nineteenth century, when commercially milled corn starch became a cheap pantry staple in North America and gave home cooks a way to thicken a lemon filling without the quantity of eggs and butter that the older lemon cheese and lemon curd tarts demanded. The result is bright, sweet, sliceable, and economical, with the whites promoted from the filling to the top so nothing is wasted. The attribution to Mrs. Carson is typical of The Home Cook Book, which was assembled from recipes signed by individual contributing housewives of of the sort that spread rapidly through Canadian and American cities in the 1870s, often produced to raise money for a hospital or church.