welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
and the old cookbook show
today we're going to do a recipe out of
this cookbook and this copy was printed
in 1855
but the book was originally published in
1850
and it is called mrs bliss practical
cookbook
soups fish meats vegetables and i'm sure
there's other things down the spine but
the rest of the spine is missing
and this book has been this book has
been placed as you can tell
there are written notes inside in two or
three different handwritings
some in pencil and some of it's written
in fountain pen
which is really cool and we're going to
do a recipe called lemon pie
and it starts out with melted butter and
sugar and we mix these together
now at the beginning of this chapter on
pastes and pies
it's called general observations but
there are four pages of observations
and it essentially says that if these
recipes don't work out it's your own
inexpertise uh that you just haven't
learned enough about making pies and
that it takes a lot to learn how to
bake a pie and that you know you will
spoil the best materials
and nothing good will come with it if
you don't know what you're doing and
that may come back
to haunt me later in the recipe so i
started this operation with a wooden
spoon i think i'm going to
switch out to a whisk
yeah that's much better that's going to
get us where we need to be
yeah it says to beat this to a cream and
that just was not going to happen
with a wooden spoon and when i see beet
i usually think wooden spoon
but whisk a whisk is what's going to get
us there in this instance
now next in our six egg whites and
eight egg yolks so right in
and the last egg yolk and we'll just
whisk that
up too next it asks for the grated rind
of
two lemons and the juice of one
so we'll get the zest grated in
and then i will juice one of the lemons
and we'll pour that in and mix it up
and the filling is done at this point so
i'm going to set that aside
we have reached the first major
crossroads in this recipe where i'm kind
of
confused and not really sure of exactly
what to do
the recipe states pour it into a
deep dish lined with paste number eight
so
i've got some paste number eight it is
basically just a
butter pie crust butter flour sugar
very simple now it says to put it into a
deep dish lined with this pastry
so in 2020 these would be
deep dish pie plates between nine and a
half
and ten inches across maybe an inch and
a half to two inches deep
and they take about one liter of
of filling to fill them up we don't have
one liter we've got
700 milliliters so a little bit less
other pie recipes in this book say to
put it into
a soup plate lined with pastry
and so this is a soup plate as you can
see it is a very
wide shallow bowl not that much
different from
what eventually becomes a pie plate
there are other recipes in here that
tell me to use a pie plate and in 1850
a pie plate was a very shallow
a little bit wider most of them were
made out of tinned
copper and i'll throw up a picture i
don't own one i could buy one
but they i looked into it they're like
400 bucks
and i don't have 400 bucks for something
that i was only going to use
once so i don't know which to do
i know that these are about a liter of
of filling and this regular
nine inch shallow pie plate
is 600 milliliters and i've got 700
milliliters of of
of filling so i think i'm going to put
the pie pastry into
this one and we'll see what happens so
rolling pie pastry is pretty simple a
little bit of flour out on your
bench put the pie pastry into the flour
i usually turn it over
so i make sure i've got a little bit of
flour on both sides
and then just start rolling it out and
somewhere between a 90 degree and 180
degree turn
after every roll will help you get it
round ish and don't be afraid to turn it
over and move it around
on the bench just to make sure that it
doesn't stick
okay i think we are there so in comes
the pie plate
and in goes the crust
push it down
and i fold it under so i can get a nice
rim at the top
now this is where we've reached another
point in the recipe where
it doesn't give me an instruction but my
better judgment tells me that i should
be doing something
and that is par baking or partially
baking this crust before we put this
really liquidy filling into it
and par baking the crust so you put pie
weights in it you put it in the oven for
about 15 minutes
sort of partially bake it it would keep
the bottom from being soggy and it would
give you a really nice crust underneath
this says nothing about par baking and
even in the four pages at the beginning
it says nothing about par baking and it
just talks about when you have a liquid
filling like this one
don't put it into the pie shell until
you're ready to stick it right into the
oven
so against my better judgment that's
what i'm going to do i'm just going to
pour in the filling
and stick it in the oven if i was making
this at home
not for the show and just doing it on my
own
i would definitely be par baking
now i'm gonna stick a baking tray
underneath it
first before i pour in the filling i'll
give the filling one
kind of last wiggle with the whisk and
in
it goes
there we go now the recipe book doesn't
give me a temperature
but in the general observations it says
great care is
requisite in heating an oven for baking
pastry
if you can hold your hand in the heated
oven while you count 20
the oven has just the proper temperature
so i'm going to say that's 375 to 400
degrees fahrenheit and it tells me a
half an hour
so into the oven it goes
and you'll notice i've got my pizza
stone in here
my hope is that it's carrying enough
heat that it can really start that
bottom crust to bake
quickly in this time period you may have
been putting it directly on the deck
of a wood burning oven and that heat
would transfer very quickly which might
mean you wouldn't need to parbake the
shell i'm really worried about that
we'll see what happens
hi glenn hey jules hi friends
1855 lemon pie
any pie is good pie i know we know this
rule yep the pie that's in front of me
that's the pie
oh i don't know what to start with cause
the crust looks really good uh
it's it's i just want to snap just snap
it off okay so let's
let's give it a go uh the texture is
kind of weird
it almost looks like it could be a
custard but you tell me
it's not a custard because there's no
milk there's no dairy
it's just eggs and lemon
it's not quite a souffle but it's kind
of a souffle
the lemon flavor is like it's really
great lemon wow
yeah it is um a cakier texture
than when you have like lemon meringue
yeah right yeah
but it's not cake no but it has
it has more of a cakey texture the lemon
flavor is amazing
but lemon meringue has that very
smoothness to it this is not
smooth in that way but it is flavorful
and lovely
and we're going to have a problem with
it because it's already gone and we're
only doing tasting right now
i know so i've been worried about
the bottom of the crust being soggy
because it wasn't par baked
baking it on the pizza stone really
bumped that up a notch the bottom crust
is nicely cooked
now something that i missed
um because there's so many sections in
this in this pie section
when you go back to pace number eight
it says to brush a beaten egg over it
and sprinkle with sugar before you put
the filling in
now because this recipe is spread across
so many pages in so many different
sections i missed that
and i know that putting a um a beaten
egg
over a pie crust that you've just
parbaked you pull it out
after well it's still hot you brush that
egg on and you're going to see that in
an upcoming pie video
you brush that egg on and that egg sort
of cooks in and makes sure that that
pie crust is really crispy
you're going to see that in our
thanksgiving pie which canadian
thanksgiving is
this week this week yeah it's soon
and so i do that there and that is that
is a that is a technique that sort of
fell out of favor and not many people
know about it but i think it should be
brought back
so there it is from 1855. it's not new
so when someone says i invented this
they did not they did not it's
everything everything has been done it's
just been
forgotten at some point probably and
then and then rediscovered people
because people rediscover stuff
that pie's a winner i agree 1855 lemon
pie give it a try
thanks for stopping by see you again
soon
you