Here in the last stretch of North Dakota winter (I hope!), the landscape continues to present itself in shades of white, grey, black, and brown. I started knitting a spring scarf last weekend, in the hopes of luring warmer weather. When I pull into the garage each afternoon, the old Weber grill looks more and more forlorn. My daughter, Cora, feels a deep sense of betrayal that the groundhog promised spring would come early -- liar!
Recently, my husband’s parents came to visit from southern California, and while they did not bring any warm weather with them, they did bring a bag full of fresh Meyer lemons from their backyard tree -- not certified organic, of course, but organic nonetheless. A whole bag of yellow orbs bright as the summer sun and, I know from experience, bursting with juice and flavor.
I knew then that lemon meringue pie was in our future, and some tasty hot toddies. And possibly a lemon cake, or a jar of preserved lemons for the refrigerator. Maybe chicken piccata, with orzo on the side. Would there be enough lemons in the bag? In case there weren’t, I started with the pie.
I make a lemon meringue pie about once every three or four years, because I am still searching for the perfect recipe. This time around I tried the one in The Perfect Recipe, which was written by Pam Anderson, former executive editor of Cook’s Illustrated, and shows the same devotion to recipe research and testing as that magazine. This recipe innovatively calls for rolling the crust out on a surface dusted with graham cracker crumbs, which keeps the crust crisp after the filling goes in. It works very well!
For me, lemon meringue pie is one of those ideal foods -- not in the sense that it’s the most perfect food of all, but in the sense that every lemon meringue pie I come across is compared to the ideal one in my taste memory. This ideal pie is from my childhood, from the middle of a California summer, made with lemons from the tree that my grandma grew in our backyard, made by my grandma or my mom (or both working together) in the morning before the heat set in, and served at night as the ocean breezes began to cool the backyard.
This ideal pie appeared only once or twice a year during my childhood -- let’s be honest, lemon meringue pie is good and tasty, but it’s not exactly simple. It has three parts: crust, curd filling, and meringue. The crust has to be baked and the curd cooked on the stove top separately. Then the meringue is whipped up, the pie assembled, and the whole thing is browned in the oven. Even for a highly-skilled multi-tasker, this is a two-hour project.
When you are bent on bringing some small glimpse of sunshine and warmth into a dreary week, a two-hour project is a perfectly reasonable time commitment, especially when a special and prized ingredient drops into your lap. Every year we look forward to my mother-in-law’s lemons, grown in the yard my husband and his brothers played in, next to the gully that separates their neighborhood from the UC Riverside campus and its outlying parking lots.
The crust turned out lovely, and very easy to crimp up in a decorative edge. Together with a filling bright in color and flavor and a meringue whose peaks turned perfectly golden, it made for a very satisfying pie: sunny, sweet, and cheering. We ate it snuggled together during family movie night. The filling was a little too lemony for Cora, but she loved the meringue topping.
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Ready to make the pie yourself? Try one of these links:
Infallible Lemon Meringue Pie, by Pam Anderson, from The Perfect Recipe.
The Ultimate Lemon Meringue Pie Recipe on Food.com, adapted from The Perfect Recipe cookbook by Pam Anderson.
Enjoy!
Merie Kirby grew up in California, moved to Minneapolis for grad school, and after getting her MFA stayed for fifteen more years. She now lives in Grand Forks, ND with her husband and daughter. Merie writes poetry and essays, as well as texts in collaboration with composers. She also writes about cooking, reading, parenting, and creating on her own blog, All Cheese Dinner. Her most recurrent dream is of making cookies with her mother. This is an excellent dream. Merie's last piece for Simple, Good, and Tasty was Joining a CSA Can Be Good for the Body, Mind, and Family.
