Gail’s Lemon Meringue Pie
Updated: Oct 5
The One Thing She Could Create Better Than Anyone Else
My mother spent much of her professional life studying bones of the ancients and yet… she made a fabulous lemon meringue pie.
By all accounts, my mother wasn’t a particularly good cook. She was a tall and formidable woman and her natural talents did not usually involve making dinner for my brother and I.
She lived in a world of bones and academia as a professor of Anthropology at UCLA for over 35 years. Gail studied and taught human evolution to generations of students and joined archaeologic excavation sites in Africa and all over the world. She could, and would discuss the origins of our species with an intense authority that made you pay attention. She was six feet tall, half Cherokee, erudite and discerning.
I don't know exactly where she learned to make it. I doubt the recipe came from her mother, who passed away before I was born. My suspicion is that it may have come from her Aunt Ovada, who was Cherokee and was also the mother of her cousin, Phyllis. Phyllis was technically my mother's first cousin, but to us she was always Aunt Phyllis.
Wherever the recipe began, by the time I was growing up, the delicious pie belonged squarely to my mother.
The way she created it every year, there were no shortcuts. The crust was formed by her own hands, flour dust creating a glow in the kitchen, the heels of her palms pushing the dough into the countertop, then gently allowed to rest in the fridge before being laid over a baking pie pan. A frozen pie crust would have been beneath her.
I can still see her separating the eggs, letting the egg whites flow through her long fingers and into her other hand until the bright yellow yolks sat alone in one mixing bowl and the egg whites in another. The requisite sugar, flour and cornstarch were gently cooked to a roiling boil, adding water and freshly grated lemon peel and juice and finally the butter to bring it all together. That hot mixture was added to the egg yolks and folded together. She made the filling with what I remember as an extraordinary amount of sugar, although somehow the finished pie was never cloyingly sweet. It was exactly what lemon meringue pie should be, tart enough to make you notice the lemon and sweet enough to make you want another slice.
And then there was the meringue. A work of art all on its own.
My mother whipped it by hand, always. No electric mixer, no easy way out, I can still hear the sound the whisk made against the edge of the bowl. She would whip it until it rose impossibly high above the lemon filling, then shape it so that when it came out of the oven, the peaks were perfectly browned at their tips. Years later, she taught me how to do it, too.
I watched her make that pie almost every year of my childhood and well into my twenties. I don't remember helping much until I reached my late teens. But I definitely watched and took it all in.
One of the clearest images I have is of the finished pie sitting on the kitchen counter to cool beside our bright yellow kitchen sink. My mother must have gotten a good deal on that sink when she remodeled the kitchen. Its color was so startling that we joked it would wake you up in the morning. The lemon filling and that yellow sink were a close match, to be sure.
Once the pie had cooled, it was covered in Saran Wrap and entrusted to me for the short trip to Aunt Phyllis' house.
The drive took only about five minutes, and I would sit with the pie carefully balanced on my lap.
Phyllis lived in a large old stone house that seemed like a castle to me and looked more like it belonged in the English countryside than in the hills of Southern California. The home sat beyond tall iron gates at the end of a long driveway. This was long before electric gates, so every arrival required someone to climb out of the car, open the gate, let the car through and close it again before the dogs escaped. And if you took a joy ride hanging on the gate, Phyllis would have something to say about it.
Inside was a house made for gatherings. There were wide-plank wooden floors, long velvet curtains surrounding leaded-glass windows and velvet couches in a huge stone living room. The fireplace was the largest I had ever seen, and on holidays there was always an enormous fire crackling inside it.
For most of my childhood and into my twenties, nearly every family holiday happened there. There was my mother, my brother and I. Phyllis and her husband, Leo, until they divorced. Their three sons, my cousins, Aunt Ovada and Uncle Billy, although to this day I'm not entirely sure whose uncle he actually was.
Very often, friends would join the table and as the cousins grew older, boyfriends, girlfriends and eventually partners were added to the table, including a French exchange student who came to study. We all fell in love with her and she eventually married my cousin and stayed for life.
For the sake of prosperity, I had the good sense to ask my Mom to write down the pie recipe. The recipe card written in her old-fashioned cursive hand, is now sticky and smudged, and is evidence that it was never intended to sit untouched in a box.
On occasion, I have made the pie myself and I now know how to make the crust. I know how much sugar goes into the filling. I know how to whip the meringue because she taught me. I even know how those little peaks are supposed to look when their tips turn brown. I know this because of her. But mine has never tasted quite like hers. Perhaps it never will. Because when I remember my mother's lemon meringue pie, I don't only taste lemon and sugar and butter.
I see that ridiculous yellow kitchen sink and a pie cooling beside it. I feel the pie balanced carefully on my lap for the drive to Phyllis' home.
And, I see my brother getting out of the car to open the iron gates. I see the old stone house at the end of the long drive, the velvet curtains around leaded-glass windows and wooden floors and I feel the warmth and crackle of the cozy fireplace.
The stone house was sold after Phyllis passed away a few years ago. I sometimes think of that house as though it were another member of the family, because in many ways it was. It held us all, year after year until, eventually, there was no longer an us to hold in quite the same way.
But I still have the recipe and the memories.
Now, my daughter Hannah makes this and many other pies. The baton has been passed as she is quite a talented baker. Maybe that is what a family recipe ultimately becomes. Not something that can ever be recreated exactly, but something carried forward.
And for a little while, the yellow sink is back. The gates glide open, there is a fire burning at Phyllis’ house and everyone is still waiting on dessert.
My mother's lemon meringue pie is a treasured recipe and that is the story behind the recipe.
This is why I created Follow the Memories. Not simply to preserve family recipes, but to follow them back to the people, places and memories that gave them meaning. What's yours?
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