Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Lemon Pie (IV)
Lemon Pie (IV)
Miss Prissie.
The juice and rind of one lemon, one cup of sugar, the yolks of two eggs, two tablespoonsful of flour, a teacupful of milk; line the dish with paste; pour in the custard; bake until done; beat the whites of the eggs; add four tablespoonsful of powdered sugar, spread on the pie and brown lightly. 4
A small, plain lemon custard pie thickened with flour rather than cornstarch, finished with a soft meringue. The original assumes you know how to handle pastry and a slow-cooling oven, so the useful work is in the numbers it leaves out.
- Teacupful"Teacup" is not a fixed measure in this period; it is usually reckoned somewhere between half a cup and three-quarters of a cup, and the book is not consistent. Half a cup of milk to a cup of sugar and two tablespoons of flour gives a firmer custard; a full cup gives a looser one that needs longer baking.
- Bake until doneFor a flour-thickened custard, 350F until the filling is set at the edges and still slightly loose in a circle at the centre, about 30 to 40 minutes. It firms as it cools; baking until the middle is rigid gives a weeping, curdled slice.
- Line the dish with pasteAn unbaked shell under a wet custard turns pale and soggy. Blind bake the crust at 400F until dry and lightly coloured before the filling goes in, then drop the heat for the custard.
- RindGrate only the coloured zest. Some nineteenth-century recipes meant the whole peel pared thin, but a modern microplane makes it easy to take pith along with it, and pith is bitter.
- FlourWhisk the flour into the sugar dry before adding yolks, juice and milk. Added to liquid on its own it lumps, and there is no cooking-out stage here to smooth it.
- Milk and acidA whole lemon's juice will visibly curdle the milk in the bowl. This is expected in this style of pie and the flour and yolks hold it together in the oven; do not try to fix it by cutting the juice.
- The meringueTwo whites and four tablespoons of powdered sugar make a soft meringue. Spread it over the filling while the pie is still warm and seal it right to the pastry rim, or it shrinks and pools. Brown at 350F for 10 to 12 minutes rather than under a fierce broiler, which colours the peaks before the inside sets.
- YieldOne 8-inch pie, six modest slices. The trailing "4" in the original is not a quantity; it is most likely an artefact of the printed page.
The Home Cook Book was assembled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by local women, with proceeds going to a charitable home — one of the earliest and most widely copied of the American community fundraising cookbooks, and the reason the same dish appears three and four times over under different contributors' names. "Miss Prissie" is a contributor's byline, likely a pseudonym. Lemon pie of this kind is generally said to have depended on two things arriving in the ordinary Midwestern kitchen at once: cheap refined sugar, and lemons shipped north by rail in quantity. The flour-thickened custard is usually taken to mark it as older than the cornstarch lemon meringue pies thought to have taken over by the early twentieth century, and the soft meringue of whites and powdered sugar is the same economy that runs through the whole book — nothing in the egg is wasted.