In the Year of Fearless Baking: Episode #15: Lemon Meringue Pie

Spring finally arrived this week. The evidence I have to support this claim is threefold:

- John and I made frozen margaritas twice.

- A very loud mockingbird has been making himself heard in the wee hours every night.

- Our radish seedlings came up yesterday.

The first teases of warm weather, combined with this amazing podcast I heard recently, have put me in a serious mood for citrus.

The fact that these gorgeous Meyer lemons were on sale at Trader Joe’s sealed the deal- I was destined to make a lemon meringue pie. PS: there’s no filter on this photo- they really were this color. Freaking gorgeous.

Did you ever read Amelia Bedelia when you were a child? Well, it’s a kids book about a housekeeper who takes things way too literally, which results in her being totally incompetent and unable to do her job well. In general, it makes an interesting comment about the power of the word, and how problematic things become when language gets misconstrued.

I bring this up because lemon meringue pie was, like, the only thing that saved her ass from getting fired. Her pie was so good that her bosses forgave all of her totally stupid mistakes, and she survived in her workplace to fight another day. Pretty awesome.

I looked at a lot of different recipes, but finally went with this one because it seemed like the most straight forward. One thing that really confused me until I was actually doing it was the moment when the egg yolks get tempered with a hot mixture of cornstarch, water and sugar. The recipe says to stir the mixture into the yolks “one whisk-full at a time”, which is strange when you’re stirring a pot of liquid that basically resembles simple syrup. But, then it’s boiling and the cornstarch kicks in and this happens:

This picture is pretty bad, but do you see how weird and thick that is? And then it dawned on me: this recipe is probably a relic of the fifties.

I haven’t researched this too much yet, but a little reading on the subject actually really surprised me. Lemon meringue pie is older than I thought- it was probably invented in the nineteenth century. That makes me wonder what older versions of this formula were like, which means I’ll probably have to do some more reading and make some more pies.

Which suits me just fine.