Sometime after Thanksgiving, I somehow got it stuck in my head that I would make a lemon meringue pie for Christmas. I have never before made a lemon meringue pie, but the flavor sounded different from my usually holiday fare of apple cranberry pies, pumpkin pies, and my splurge from last year's holiday season--a pear pie. A co-worker said his wife had recently whipped one up. He ran through the steps. It didn't sound too complicated.
A few days ago, I sat down with the New Classics to look up the recipe and make sure I had all the ingredients I would need before our rinky dink grocery store closed shop for the Christmas holiday. Martha's New Classics has always seemed to have pretty much every recipe for which I have ever gone hunting. I flipped to the index and found Lemon Meringue Pie on page 448-49. This is where things started to get complicated. I turned to page 448 and found only chocolate souffle. Huh. I repeated this two-step process several times, grumbling to my neighbor Dorothy (visiting for a holiday cocktail) about some idiot in Martha's shop who flubbed up the page numbering in the index. I flipped through the entire Pie and Tarts chapter and then the Fruit Desserts chapter. Nothing. No lemon meringue pie. Completely confused, I returned to the index only to take notice of the small blue footprint at the bottom on the page. "All entries printed in blue refer to The Original Classics." Great. Wouldn't it just figure. Here it is my first day of setting out to cook every recipe in The New Classics and the recipe I need is in The Old Classics. There is no way I am cooking both cookbooks. That would take ages.
Still determined to make my pie, I confide in Martha's website, which I have often used before to dig up recipes I remember from old editions of her magazine that I neglected to save. With the internet as vast as it is, cookbooks in print are really quite obsolete, providing only the comfort of tradition or perhaps the inspiration of simply turning the page to come up with something new and different for a special occasion.
I found Martha's recipe for Mile High Lemon Pie on her website, with a photo of a huge fluffy pile of meringue at least six inches high and saved it to the Favorites menu on my internet browser. All I needed from the grocery store was unsalted butter. At least that was a plus.
3:00 on Christmas finally rolled around. It was time to start the pie. The first step was to whip up a patch of pie dough, or Pate Brisse, as Martha insists on calling it in pretty much every single one of her pie recipes. I am assuming Pate Brisse is a french term, and this must be Martha's elitist tribute to Julia Childs. The pie dough was made without a hitch.
Next step: Put your pie dough in a pie dish and bake at 400 degrees for twenty minutes or so to brown it up. Martha instructed to use parchment paper and pie weights (or dried beans) to weigh down the crust. I didn't have pie weights (I have never even seen pie weights) and I don't have parchment paper (last Thanksgiving I discovered the hard way that wax paper and parchment paper are not one in the same). I did have dried beans and considered sticking them on top of my dough but hesitated fearing they would get baked into the dough and I wouldn't get them back out. I proceeded by simply skipping this instruction and putting the pie dough in the pie dish and placing it in the oven sans parchment paper and pie weights/dried beans. That was a mistake. I figured the dough would shrink a bit, which it did. It also puffed up like a blow fish. Whoops. I was sad at first and briefly considered abandoning my mission altogether. Reconsidering, I poured a glass of wine, grabbed a fork and flattened my blow fish pie crust down into a single layer, figuring no one would be able to tell once my lemon filling was down on top of my messy crust.
Step two: Make lemon filling. Here too I went amiss. Martha said use a large saucepan. I don't have a large saucepan. I have a little saucepan (too little) and a couple of iron skillets. I opted for an iron skillet. This was all fine and dandy until little black skillet bits from my nicely seasoned skillet starting floating about in my lemon filling as I whisked away endlessly. I filtered as many out as I could with a tea strainer and feared my pie would taste like bacon and eggs. How lovely.
Martha obviously doesn't do her own dishes. The recipe said to transfer the lemon filling into a bowl and then into the waiting pie crust, which I did only to realize I had just made an extra dirty dish--the bowl. Next time, just pour the lemon filling right into the pie dish as to not make more dirty dishes then needed.
While the lemon filling chilled the fridge, I started on the meringue. I have never whipped anything so long in my life. I swear I whipped those egg whites and sugar for half a pro basketball game and they still weren't as fluffy as I thought they should be. I probably could have kept whipping, but my feet were tired from standing at the counter with the electric mixer for so long and I decided my meringue was fluffy enough.
I am pretty sure my lemon meringue pie was several inches (at least) shorter than Martha's. Maybe she cheated and used more eggs in her meringue for the photo shoot--a double batch. That would be just like her.
Either way, I was relieved when the pie didn't resemble bacon and eggs and actually tasted quite good. It didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped, and I have made a mental note to buy parchment paper and a large saucepan for next time.
A few days ago, I sat down with the New Classics to look up the recipe and make sure I had all the ingredients I would need before our rinky dink grocery store closed shop for the Christmas holiday. Martha's New Classics has always seemed to have pretty much every recipe for which I have ever gone hunting. I flipped to the index and found Lemon Meringue Pie on page 448-49. This is where things started to get complicated. I turned to page 448 and found only chocolate souffle. Huh. I repeated this two-step process several times, grumbling to my neighbor Dorothy (visiting for a holiday cocktail) about some idiot in Martha's shop who flubbed up the page numbering in the index. I flipped through the entire Pie and Tarts chapter and then the Fruit Desserts chapter. Nothing. No lemon meringue pie. Completely confused, I returned to the index only to take notice of the small blue footprint at the bottom on the page. "All entries printed in blue refer to The Original Classics." Great. Wouldn't it just figure. Here it is my first day of setting out to cook every recipe in The New Classics and the recipe I need is in The Old Classics. There is no way I am cooking both cookbooks. That would take ages.
Still determined to make my pie, I confide in Martha's website, which I have often used before to dig up recipes I remember from old editions of her magazine that I neglected to save. With the internet as vast as it is, cookbooks in print are really quite obsolete, providing only the comfort of tradition or perhaps the inspiration of simply turning the page to come up with something new and different for a special occasion.
I found Martha's recipe for Mile High Lemon Pie on her website, with a photo of a huge fluffy pile of meringue at least six inches high and saved it to the Favorites menu on my internet browser. All I needed from the grocery store was unsalted butter. At least that was a plus.
3:00 on Christmas finally rolled around. It was time to start the pie. The first step was to whip up a patch of pie dough, or Pate Brisse, as Martha insists on calling it in pretty much every single one of her pie recipes. I am assuming Pate Brisse is a french term, and this must be Martha's elitist tribute to Julia Childs. The pie dough was made without a hitch.
Next step: Put your pie dough in a pie dish and bake at 400 degrees for twenty minutes or so to brown it up. Martha instructed to use parchment paper and pie weights (or dried beans) to weigh down the crust. I didn't have pie weights (I have never even seen pie weights) and I don't have parchment paper (last Thanksgiving I discovered the hard way that wax paper and parchment paper are not one in the same). I did have dried beans and considered sticking them on top of my dough but hesitated fearing they would get baked into the dough and I wouldn't get them back out. I proceeded by simply skipping this instruction and putting the pie dough in the pie dish and placing it in the oven sans parchment paper and pie weights/dried beans. That was a mistake. I figured the dough would shrink a bit, which it did. It also puffed up like a blow fish. Whoops. I was sad at first and briefly considered abandoning my mission altogether. Reconsidering, I poured a glass of wine, grabbed a fork and flattened my blow fish pie crust down into a single layer, figuring no one would be able to tell once my lemon filling was down on top of my messy crust.
Step two: Make lemon filling. Here too I went amiss. Martha said use a large saucepan. I don't have a large saucepan. I have a little saucepan (too little) and a couple of iron skillets. I opted for an iron skillet. This was all fine and dandy until little black skillet bits from my nicely seasoned skillet starting floating about in my lemon filling as I whisked away endlessly. I filtered as many out as I could with a tea strainer and feared my pie would taste like bacon and eggs. How lovely.
Martha obviously doesn't do her own dishes. The recipe said to transfer the lemon filling into a bowl and then into the waiting pie crust, which I did only to realize I had just made an extra dirty dish--the bowl. Next time, just pour the lemon filling right into the pie dish as to not make more dirty dishes then needed.
While the lemon filling chilled the fridge, I started on the meringue. I have never whipped anything so long in my life. I swear I whipped those egg whites and sugar for half a pro basketball game and they still weren't as fluffy as I thought they should be. I probably could have kept whipping, but my feet were tired from standing at the counter with the electric mixer for so long and I decided my meringue was fluffy enough.
I am pretty sure my lemon meringue pie was several inches (at least) shorter than Martha's. Maybe she cheated and used more eggs in her meringue for the photo shoot--a double batch. That would be just like her.
Either way, I was relieved when the pie didn't resemble bacon and eggs and actually tasted quite good. It didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped, and I have made a mental note to buy parchment paper and a large saucepan for next time.
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