Recipe Time: Lemon Meringue Pie

One of my alltime favorite sweets is lemon mirengue pie, it’s always been a big hit in my family, especially with the little extra quirks we’ve added to it, like adding just a little lemon into the pie crust. Adding lemon to a pie crust ( especially apple or peach ) gives it a tart, juicy flavor and compliments almost any kind of fruit pie. Our pie recipe is very old, it’s from a 1905 child’s cook book that my grandmother gave to me for my birthday when I was 11 years old, and I’ve tried to make use of it without damaging the book so it’s since become a traditional sweet for my sister Laota and myself. I’ll give you the recipe exactly as it appears in the book, plus our pie crust. Please bare with me, this is kind of hard to understand, since it wasn’t written for someone who had access to an eclectrics® mixer:

“1 Lemon
1 Cup of Water
1 small Cup of sugar
2 teaspoonfuls corn-starch
Butter the size of a hickory-nut
Yolk of one egg

Grate the rind of the lemon, and then squeeze out the juice. Beat ( I use a mixer for this ) the yolk of the egg , add the water, with the corn-startch stirred in, orange juice and rind and butter, and cook till it grows rather thick. Bake your crust first; then bake the lemon filling in it, then beat the white of your egg with a tablespoonful of granulated sugar, and put over it and brown. This is an especially nice rule.”

Now for the pie shell, this can be used for apple and peach pies as well, I recommend apple:

1 Cup of Flour
1/6 Cup of butter
1/6 Cup of Crisco
Pinch of Salt
1/4 Cup of Chilled Lemon Juice ( orange juice may be used )

Combine dry ingredients first and stir them by hand, next add the butter and shortening and blend on slow in your mixer until it’s got a pebbly texture with pea-sized pieces, but make sure not to over-work it because it’ll get tough, and over-working even more will make it fall apart. Now, roll it into a ball between floured hands and use a french rolling pin ( or a wooden dowl, clean and floured ) to roll it out over a floured parchment until it’s the two inches larger than the pan you’ll be baking your pie in. Line your pan ( do not grease ) with parchment paper and press the dough into the pan firmly, then prick the bottom and sides of the dough with a fork and bake it at 350 degrees for 11 minutes, or until golden brown. Cool the pie shell before putting the filling in. For an applie or peach pie, do not pre-cook shell.

The pie is delicious but it’s hard to make, I can’t make the dough by hand because of my arthritis and my current mixer just isn’t powerful enough for the job. To be honest, I’d rather get ahold of a Hamilton Beach® Mixer. Hamilton Beach® products are almost never overpriced, and they’ve got this new stand mixer that has a great design to it. I’m partial to the Pineapple color ( they have other colors, I just love yellow, lol ). The Hamilton Beach® Stand Mixer has 400 watts of power, exactly what I need to replace the mixer I currently own. My mixer’s old, and it can barely make it through mixing bread dough, so I almost never use it, which is a shame because I love to cook and bake. Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to afford that mixer? 12 settings, locking bowl, two-way rotating head? It’s definately worth the trouble of getting one.

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