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Peach Meringue Pie (Roll out half inch wider than)
Roll out half inch wider than the pie plate quarter pound pie paste as per 117. Lightly butter a pie plate, place the paste over, press down with the thumbs all around the edges, neatly trim any superfluous paste around the border, pinch it all around with a pincers and lightly egg the border. Open a pint can peaches, drain well and cut into slices quarter-inch thick; place in a bowl with two tablespoons sugar and one teaspoon vanilla essence, mix well and evenly arrange on the pie plate. Set in the oven to bake twenty minutes. Remove to a table. Beat up in a basin to a stiff froth three egg whites, add two ounces granulated sugar and half teaspoon vanilla essence; gently mix with a skimmer; place the preparation over the peaches, nicely smooth the surface with the blade of a knife; sprinkle a little fine sugar over, reset in the oven for ten minutes, or until a nice golden colour. Remove and serve either hot or cold.
A brisk professional shorthand from a book written for cooks who already knew the drill. The gaps worth filling are oven temperature, which the original never gives, and the handling of the meringue.
- The hinge: sugar into the whitesBeat the whites to a stiff froth first, then add the sugar gradually while still beating, rather than folding it in all at once with a skimmer. Sugar dumped into finished whites and stirred deflates them and is the usual cause of a meringue that beads and weeps.
- Oven temperaturesNone are stated. Bake the pastry and fruit at 425F for the first twenty minutes so the base sets before the peach juice soaks in, then drop to 350F for the ten minutes of meringue browning.
- Seal the meringue to the crustSpread it so it touches the pastry rim the whole way round. A meringue that floats free of the edge shrinks back and lets liquid pool underneath.
- Quarter pound of pie pasteAbout 4 oz of shortcrust, enough for a single bottom crust of roughly 8 inches, and stretched thin at 9. Recipe 117 in the same book is presumably the plain pie paste; any all-butter or lard shortcrust does the same job.
- Two ounces of sugarRoughly a quarter cup of granulated sugar for three whites, which is on the lean side by modern practice. Two tablespoons per white gives a more stable meringue.
- A pint can of peachesClose to a modern 15 oz can, giving something like a cup and a half of drained fruit. Drain them properly and blot them; canned peaches in heavy syrup carry a lot of liquid and residual sweetness, so taste before adding all of the two tablespoons of sugar.
- Egging the borderA wash of beaten egg on the pastry rim, brushed on before baking, mainly for colour and gloss. A pincers is a pastry crimper.
- Yield and servingProbably about six modest slices. It cuts more cleanly cold; served hot the fruit layer is loose and the meringue slides.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book of 1906, a vast collection of numbered recipes that cross-reference each other, which is why the instruction here begins mid-stride with "pie paste as per 117." Filippini had spent years in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and the terseness is a professional's: a skimmer for folding, a pincers for the rim, no oven temperature because the cook was assumed to know his range. What dates the recipe most is the pint can of peaches, opened without apology. Commercially canned fruit had become cheap and reliable by the turn of the century, and cookbooks of the period began treating a can as an ordinary pantry item rather than a compromise, which is what let a peach pie appear on a table in February. Meringue-topped fruit and custard pies are often said to have been at their height in American cooking in exactly these decades, the whites being, by a plausible but undocumented surmise, a use for the surplus left by rich yolk-based pastry work elsewhere in the kitchen.