A Heavenly Memorial Day Pie
In every family, there are food memories and traditions that are passed down from one generation to the next. Each year, on birthdays and at holiday gatherings, the preparation of treasured family recipes and the sharing of their backstories have become a part of the family’s collective food memories. This Memorial Day, I will once again share the food story of my mother’s heavenly Memorial Day lemon meringue pie.
As a child, I thought meringue was something akin to clouds and angels. Only a chosen few, it seemed to me, could make a pie that mirrored a cloud burnt by sunlight. When it came to meringue, Mom was definitely in the company of angels. Sadly, I don’t have a handwritten recipe card spelling out how she created her first lemon meringue pie. But while visiting her in San Antonio a few years ago, I found a copy of Diane Rossen Worthington’s cookbook The Best of Casual American Cooking: Diner. It’s a delicious collection of comfort food recipes, including one for lemon meringue pie.
Serving the “food of the common people,” roadside diners drew on America's romance with the old Pullman dining cars of the 1920s. It was comforting fare that came at a bargain price, making diners 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. While pastry shells filled with lemon curd can be traced back to European kitchens, topping the lemon filling with meringue dates from 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.
The recipe in Worthington’s Diner cookbook warns that every ingredient should be measured ahead and be at the ready. When the 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.
Whenever I make this heavenly pie over Memorial Day weekend, it reminds me of the years when my mother must have looked upward for strength, praying for Dad to return safely from the Pacific Theater where he piloted a B-29 in the final months of World War II. It is a treasured comfort food memory of my mother Alice who bravely carried on at home in my father’s absence all those decades ago.
