An Easter Saturday lemon meringue pie epic: the process

This is how it happened:

I look out of the window. Realise the weather is meh. Decide this morning is a good time to make the lemon meringue pie my mum used to make so that I can send the recipe to a Twitter acquaintance in Germany. This was the process one Saturday many years after I'd ever made it or eaten it instead of birthday cake. I used to ask for it on my birthday instead of cake.

I get out wee notebook in which I've written recipes. It's not in there. Get out old Yorkshire Tea tin in which, over the years, I've kept cut out bits of paper, card, and plastic with recipes on them. Go through recipe tin. It's not there either. But I do find a few I'd forgotten about and resolve to cook them again soon.

Decide it's too early to call my mum and ask if she remembers. She'd have to remember as she's blind so couldn't read it out.

Then I notice that I'm feeling a bit blergh. Realise I haven't had my second breakfast yet today. Make tea and toast. Spread toast with butter and Frank Cooper's Fine Cut Oxford Marmalade. Eat and drink. I only do toast in ~2cm thick doorsteps (homemade bread) so the toast rack is a space between the bread board and a cheese board.

best marmalade if not homemade

The bread board works well as a toast propper-upper because it is a 4cm thick slab of sycamore wood honed into a fine thing at Kilmory Workshop on Arran. I bought a round one there at the same time for Derbyshire Daughter's twenty-fifth birthday. Barring bread board mishaps she should still have it when she's seventy-five.

Then it is time to find a pie plate. The baking tin cupboard is duly searched for a sandwich cake tin. There is no sandwich cake tin in there. Nor is there one in another likely cupboard, although there is a satsuma.  (?)

A shrug follows and I decide to use the lid of a broken pyrex casserole dish. I write sandwich tins on the shopping list.

Where do recalcitrant sandwich tins go? I used to have two, I'm sure.

At this point I decide it is no longer too early to phone my mum and do so. Youngest brother (YB from hereon in), who lives with her and is her carer, answers. Chat with YB about purpose of call. He goes to fetch mum to the phone. She can't hear me even if I shout because her hearing aid is playing up. We try for a bit while YB goes rummaging for lemon meringue pie recipe (she can't remember though she knew it by heart all those years ago), but we fail. She calls YB back to the phone. He comes with a recipe for lemon meringue pudding. It won't be that says mum. YB goes back to rummage some more while mum and I manage to communicate a bit.

YB returns to phone and reads out recipe. I only need some very basic proportions but he is not a cook so reads all sorts of details about pricking and decorating (decorating!? my mum didn't have time for that when feeding seven hungry people) the blind pastry base. Anyway, I scribble down some basics and the recipe sounds similar to what I remember my mum doing. I learned to cook sitting on a kitchen stool watching her, plus some experimentation of my own, but the basic methods and principles I learned from her. We had to help too, especially at weekends so I have a vivid memory, for instance, of making pastry for an apple pie one Sunday while dad and mum were at church (I'd been already) and dusting pastry crumbs off my hands in order to answer the front door to one of dad's college students who had picked up middle brother (MB) from under a horse chestnut tree that he'd fallen out of on the college grounds. MB's face was a mess. I'll spare you the details. I asked the student to take MB to hospital Casualty, as we called it then; student was using the student union van for transport) and said I'd tell our parents when they returned. Since I've started the digression I'll finish it! The long and the short of it was that Casualty had patched up (stitched up) MB's nose and lip very well by the time mum and dad got there. MB was taken to the car on a wheelchair and lifted into the car. It wasn't until they all got home (apple pie all done and dusted, in case you were anxious about it) that they realised MB had also sprained an ankle and couldn't walk on it! Everyone got stoked up with Sunday roast and apple pie before he was taken back for that to be checked. When the GP came (they did in those days) to see MB to take out the face stitches he said he didn't let his kids climb trees. MB, horrified, asked "Why not?" Doc no doubt just shook his head despairingly, or laughed. A week or so later MB fell off his bike and split the newly repaired nose injury again. This family is where I learned my "Hey ho!" attitude to life.

Now, where were we? Oh yes... lemon meringue pie recipe. Well, by this time, that is after the toast and marmalade sustenance, I decided to clean my teeth. While I'm doing that Toad taps on the bathroom door with YB on the phone again because mum had thought the recipe he had given me was her hand-written one "from a friend; always the best ones" but it wasn't and she was concerned I had been misinformed! Cue me spitting toothpaste out of mouth and speaking to YB, reassuring him that the ingredient proportions in the recipe he had given me sounded very like what I remember mum using so it was fine, certainly near enough. And, most importantly, with nothing like the quantity of sugar that the online recipes I'd found were using. The best thing about lemon meringue pie is the zing! You don't want to smother that.

old scales, great scales

Phew. By this time it was nearly eleven thirty. I made the pastry. It's chilling while I write this, probably well chilled by now given all the above. 

Pastry!

Retrieve.

Roll.

Bake blind.

There wasn't enough pastry to make anything else so I chopped up the trimmings and fed them to the local robins and blackbirds.

The shortcrust pastry recipe I used is my mum's basic one: plain flour and half its weight in lard plus a pinch of salt: shortest pastry in the west!

I did find my ceramic blind baking beans that I haven't used for centuries. Tins may wander but baking beans do not, it seems.

Actually, just as I'm about to get the pastry out of the fridge, another digression occurs. Toadlet appears wanting help to move back a table that a few months ago she moved all by herself from her room to the den. I suggest she gets on with it. She goes to look at it and comes back saying it won't go through the doors, you know, all those doors she took it through a few months ago. I sigh and solve the problem otherwise by telling her to use a basketry hamper from my bedroom with a tray on it as a table instead. And I supply her with an extension cable because it's the old iMac that she wants to have back in her room. Whether this is for homework purposes or for all her Hogwartian pursuits, I've no idea and don't really care.

Next up juice and zest lemons, separate eggs, measure out cornflour, sugar and water. That is, according to the rejigged recipe from memory and YB's dictated instructions:

2 lemons, juiced and zest grated

2 eggs, separated

3oz (75-80g) sugar, later updated to 4oz (100g)

8 Tbsps (1 tablespoon = 15ml) water

2 Tbsps cornflour

Next distraction: Toad comes in with painting rollers. I sent him out for milk and chicken. I bought all the ingredients to make paella the other day, except chicken. I thought there was some in the freezer is my excuse.

The significance of the painting rollers is that he's painting the walls of Toadlet's room. Toadlet started stripping wallpaper during the summer school holidays in 2014. We are getting there! It's complicated in an old house whose walls need dedamping and repairing outside before one can do much inside. Summer 2014 saw the complicated repair of our back wall, the one that faces most of the wetness that the Atlantic dumps on us from the west.

So, while I'm supposed to be making a lemon pie filling, I'm thinking: Toadlet has just cluttered up some of the cleared space.... Sigh! But Toad was taking a long time. It's two weeks since he did a base coat on wall two and he wouldn't be thinking about it now if he hadn't cancelled his plan to go and draw squirrels at Glasgow Botanic Garden. Me? I'm sayin' nowt.

He also bought a new handle for flushing the downstairs loo because the other one broke ten days or so ago and both of us forgot to get a replacement. We've been Heath Robinsonning by taking the lid of the cistern off and yanking the lever thingy by hand. I think wall painting may be on hold for a bit longer as he's fitting the new handle the now. This involves several trips through the kitchen to the washus for various tools.

Lemon pie filling! Do it.

I haven't warmed the lemons. Hey ho.

Pro tip: if you squeeze your lemons straight into the pan as I did, remember to fish the pips out. What I need is one of those long-handled pickle jar spoons with a hole in it for drainage. <Thinks about drill with metal drilling bit> I may be able to arrange such a spoon.

Put the grated zest into the pan as well, plus the cornflour that has been mixed to a smooth paste with the water, and the sugar.

Heat the ingredients in the pan, stirring frequently, until a smooth, thick lemon 'sauce' is achieved. You can test it for taste at this stage and add more sugar if you must. Remove from the heat and allow to cool a little. Then stir in the egg yolks and pour the mixture into the baked pastry case.

While I am stirring the lemon sauce, I am also heating up some soup because it is half past lunch time and I'm hungry. There is a scrap of lemon pulp on my iPad where I'm writing this. Oh well, at least it isn't the usual marmalade.

Eats soup while pulpy lemon sauce (I like it like that but you can strain the lemon juice if you want) is cooling.

Toad comes into the kitchen again to make himself a cup of tea. He gazes at the kitchen table and remarks: "So, lemon and pea meringue, is it?" Pea soup, you see. Humph :)

So it's his fault I forgot to taste test the lemon sauce until after I'd poured it into the pastry case, right? It was a bit on the zingtastic side even for me so I sprinkled some more sugar on top and whistled a merry tune while I patted it into the still slightly warm sauce with the back of a fork.

Whip the egg whites. I chucked the sugar in with them before the whipping—whoops!—so the meringue won't be as frothy as it should be. Still tastes good though. I licked the mixing blades when I'd finished the whipping. I was thinking, when I should have been concentrating on egg whites and the frothiness of meringues, about how old my Kenwood hand mixer is. I bought it in 1977 and it's still going strong.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon when I put the pie in the oven. Another five minutes was all I need to clear up the remaining mess because I cleared up as I went along like a proper cook (ha!). That's another thing my mum taught me. Cheers, mum! and the pie looks good. I am looking forward to a yummy slice later this afternoon when it has cooled down.

Here, meanwhile, is the short version of the recipe, @gbugster:

Lemon Meringue Pie

Shortcrust pastry to fit your pie plate (I use plain flour and lard; see above) and baked blind.

The lemon filling:

2 lemons, juiced and zests grated
2 eggs, separated
4oz (100g, or more to taste) sugar
8 Tablespoons (120ml) water
2 Tablespoons (30ml) cornflour

Put the lemon juice and zest into a small pan. Add the sugar. Mix the cornflour and water together and add to the pan. Heat all through, stirring frequently, until the sauce thickens. Cook for a couple of minutes.
Allow the sauce to cool a little and then add the yolks, Stir in well.
Pour the lemon sauce into your pastry case.

The meringue topping:

Whip up the two egg whites until light and frothy, then fold in some sugar to taste (about 2oz/50g). Put this on top of the lemon sauce and bake your pie at gas5/190ºC/375ºF for until the meringue turns a golden brown (approx 10-15 minutes).

Serve warm or cold. Enjoy!