Lemon Meringue Pie
In every family, food memories and traditions are passed down from one generation to the next. On birthdays, holidays, and in times of remembrance, the preparation of recipes rooted in our collective memories takes place anew in kitchens across the land. Last week as volunteers placed American flags in neat rows in cemeteries across America, I found myself moved to revisit the food story of my mother’s first lemon meringue pie.
When I was a child, my mother Alice made a pie that mirrored a cloud burnt by sunlight. When it came to meringue, she was in my estimation in the company of angels. Sadly, I don’t have a handwritten recipe card spotted with age spelling out how she created her miraculous lemon meringue pies. Nonetheless, my search for one took me on a fascinating culinary journey that I want to share with you this morning.
A few years ago, while visiting my family in San Antonio, I found a cookbook that my mother had probably purchased at an estate sale. Unable to resist the title, Diner: The Best of Casual American Cooking, I brought it home with me and added it to my cookbook library. Compiled by Diane Rossen Worthington, it is a delicious collection of comfort food recipes, including one for lemon meringue pie.
It is also a fascinating look back at a time when Americans took to their cars and stopped for meals at roadside diners where “food of the common people” was served. Diners drew on America's romance with the old Pullman dining cars of the 1920s and provided comforting fare that came at a bargain price. Affordable even in the leanest years of the Great Depression, by the 1950s diners were an American institution. We were a nation on the move in brand new automobiles painted apple pie á la mode colors. Diners fueled mobile Americans filled with postwar optimism, a sense of prosperity, and an appetite for living.
Like the American diner, lemon meringue pie is itself a kind of American tradition. Pastry shells filled with lemon curd can be traced back to European kitchens, but topping the filling with meringue is an American tradition from the Pennsylvania Dutch in the 1800s. Custard pies came out of kitchens in the pre-cholesterol-conscious days when Americans ate eggs with abandon. The filling is a carefully blended and cooked mixture of sugar, cornstarch, salt, water, egg yolks (4), butter, and fresh lemon juice. The meringue is the stuff of air. Egg whites (5) and cream of tartar whipped into peaks, with a dash of sugar and salt and then, more vigorous beating until finally stiff peaks can be formed with the back of a spoon.
In Diner, directions for preparing the meringue emphasize that ingredients should be measured ahead and be at the ready. When the lemon filling finally thickens and is poured hot into a pre-baked pie shell, the moment for meringue arrives. The beater hits the egg whites and the cook invokes the angels, praying for miraculous transformations of air and water into snow-capped peaks. Four minutes later, a mountain of meringue is piled onto the still hot lemon filling, peaks are pushed even higher with the back of a spoon, and the pie is put in a moderate oven for 12-15 minutes until the meringue's peaks and moraines turn golden, as if kissed by the sun.
I make this pie on Memorial Day because it reminds me of the years when my mother often looked upward for strength, praying for my father to return safely from the Pacific Theater where he was a B-29 pilot in the final months of World War II. Most likely, that it was then that she turned to her Good Housekeeping cookbook and bravely assembled her first lemon meringue pie.
While exploring the periphery of “the Lodge”—the rehab center where Kit now resides and works on regaining his balance and mobility—I have discovered enormous rose bushes several decades old. Each evening before I get into our car and drive home, I walk from bush to bush and breath in deeply-rooted fragrances of roses that fill their sturdy branches. I cut multi-colored bouquets and share them with the residents and staff who then share memories of their own gardens. And like the scent of roses, lemon meringue pie baked in the kitchen at the Lodge evokes their food memories.
After moving to CA two years ago, Kit and I discovered Mel’s Diner in Auburn just 35 miles down highway 49 from Nevada City where we live. Each stop at Mel’s is a nostalgic culinary journey back to the 1950s. We split a Mel’s cheeseburger or a plate of fish and sweet potato fries. That way, there is still room for us to share a slice of lemon meringue pie.
Food memories connect us. The Common Ingredient is a food/recipe-sharing website started in Columbia MO by a handful of women on a mission to address food insecurity. The common ingredient is love—whipped up in Missouri, spread to Virginia and California. Meet the team, submit a recipe, read comfort food stories and Youth Cook! Try TCI recipes. Email us at hello@thecommoningredient.com.