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Lemon Pie
Mrs. H. Baird.
The juice and grated rind of one lemon, one cup of water, one tablespoon corn starch, one cup sugar, one egg, and a piece of butter the size of a small egg; boil the water; wet the corn starch with a little cold water, and stir it in; when it boils up pour it on the sugar and butter; after it cools add the egg and lemon. Bake with upper and under crust.
A thin, old-fashioned cornstarch lemon filling baked between two crusts rather than piled under meringue. The one thing that decides whether it works is temperature: the cooked starch must cool before the egg goes in, or the egg scrambles and the filling turns grainy.
- Butter "the size of a small egg"Roughly 1½ to 2 oz, so 3 to 4 tablespoons. Comparison to an egg or a walnut is a common way of specifying butter in nineteenth-century cookbooks.
- Cool it properlyLet the thickened mixture drop to lukewarm, below about 120F, before beating in the egg. If you are in a hurry, temper instead: whisk a little of the warm starch into the beaten egg, then return it all to the pan off the heat.
- Corn starchSame product as today's cornstarch. One tablespoon to a cup of liquid gives a soft set that firms further in the oven; do not increase it or the slice turns pasty.
- One lemonExpect 2 to 3 tablespoons of juice from a modern supermarket lemon. Grate the zest before juicing, and stop at the yellow.
- Oven heatThe book assumes you know what a pie wants. Start at 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for another 25 to 30 minutes until the top is evenly browned.
- Vent the topA sealed lid over a wet starch filling will lift and split. Cut two or three slashes or prick the top crust before it goes in.
- Pan and yieldThis quantity suits about one 8-inch pie, six modest wedges. Serve it fully cool; warm cornstarch filling runs.
Lemon pie in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s took many forms: the meringue-topped kind, which needed several eggs and a cook confident with whites, and the frugal double-crust kind, which used one egg and a spoonful of starch to stretch a single lemon into a whole pie. This is firmly the second sort. Cornstarch had become a cheap grocery staple after commercial manufacture took hold in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, and it let households build custard-like fillings with a fraction of the eggs their grandmothers would have used. Community cookbooks of the period, compiled from contributions by named local women, are full of exactly this kind of thrift, and the attribution to Mrs. H. Baird is the point rather than an ornament: these were recipes vouched for by neighbours whose pies you had eaten.