My mother frequently baked lemon meringue pie while I was growing up. I loved the meringue part. I don't remember if I ever watched her make the pie. I'd come home from school and the pie would be cooling in the fridge. I think she might have used that lemon curd that can be bought at the grocery store, Robertsons, the jam company sells them. A British institution for more than 100 years, they're discontinuing the line, but that's another story.
I'm not positive if Mother used that lemon curd. But she was from Scotland and the British like this sort of stuff. I just remember we always had a jar of it in the fridge and I don't remember what else it was used for.
Its been around 20 years since I last had some of Mother's lemon meringue pie, and she didn't keep the recipe around so I'll never be able to duplicate it.
A couple of years ago we took my father out to the Home Restaurant in Maple Ridge. As the name suggests it is home cooked meals, or at least inspired just like home meals. They have great homemade pies. In the summer they often have great tarts too. They have a great lemon meringue pie with heaps of meringue on the top. As we came in I pointed out the lemon meringue pie to Father and he was quite happy to see it, commenting he hadn't had one in years. He had soup for dinner and that was it, leaving plenty of room for the huge piece of lemon meringue pie that he enjoyed for dessert.
Today I made my first lemon meringue pie from a recipe I found on the Internet. The thing takes a good hour of preparation time, mostly the cooking of the lemon filling. I wondered if my pie crust was a little thick, but I left it alone. When it came time to whipping the egg whites and sugar it took forever for the little peaks to form. After 10 minutes at high speed on the mixer I left it running and dealt with taking my laundry from the dryer and folding it. 5 minutes later I decided it was maybe going to be as peaky as it would get and I spooned out my lemon filling into the pie crust and topped it with the meringue. Now I managed to get peaks, but no way was my meringue the huge topping like the one at the Home Restaurant. In fact it was about the same height as the meringue on the pies Mother used to bake. It takes 15 minutes in the oven and then about 4 hours to cool down in the fridge before it can be eaten. So there's a big time committment here.
And then it was time for me to try a piece. I cut into it and served it on a plate. Yes, it looked exactly like the pie Mother used to make except the crust was a little thicker. But even with a thick crust, my crust tasted better than Mother's. My secret to a good pie crust has always been to use Crisco golden shortening. The pie itself was OK. It was not like how Mom used to make.
I'm going to try another recipe, maybe next week, maybe in a couple of weeks. I kind of want to get this lemon meringue pie down.
Tomorrow I think I'll bring a slice of pie over to my Father.
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