If this is your first time to our blog, we are more than just recipes! Each of the recipes on our blog is a recreation from a cookbook published in 1951 in Santa Maria, California. We are not only recreating these recipes, but we are also revisiting the lives of each contributor and sharing their bios with you. You can read more about this project on our About page.
After a few soupy pies (and a much-improved blind-baked pie crust), I am calling this my first official recipe fail.
Nellie (Blosser) Baker's recipe for Lemon Chiffon Pie is sparse. The ingredients are simple and the instructions are quick. At first glance, it's clear that there is an ingredient missing - there is nothing to thicken the filling. Maybe it was unintentional, or maybe cooks at the time would have just known what to add? Maybe that's a stretch?
Nellie was the first Euro-American girl to be born in the Santa Maria Valley, and her parents were considered pioneers. The eventual Blosser Rd was named after her father. She continued in her parents tradition by spending much of her life in service of the budding community before passing in 1949, two years prior to the Company's a-Comin' cookbook being published.
I've made several attempts at Nellie's recipe. In the first attempt, I followed the recipe exactly and came out with a soupy mess, which is really what I had expected. After looking at some modern recipes, I tried adding in some other ingredients while sticking with Nellie's method. This ended up coming out slightly less soupy, but still failed. My biggest success came when I dropped Nellie's recipe entirely and went with a more modern recipe. The method was different, but the ingredients were much the same. It still didn't set quite right, but it wasn't completely liquid either. It wasn't all a loss, though. At the very least, my blind-baking skills got a major upgrade
Considering she passed years before the cookbook was published, it's entirely possible that Nellie's recipe was contributed on her behalf and not entirely accurate as a result. I'm not sure that we will ever know for sure. Regardless of the failed recipe, she certainly is one figure with an amazing life story.
If you ended up making your own version of Lemon Chiffon Pie, let me know how it turned out in the comments.
This recipe failed for me and seems to be missing at least one ingredient, but I had better success with a more modern recipe.
Let me know your thoughts on Nellie's recipe or how your own Lemon Chiffon Pie turned out in the comments.
