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Old-Fashioned Lemon Meringue Pie Print E-mail
Monday, 28 February 2011
 

According to Provençale legend, lemons were first cultivated on the Côte d'Azure, when Adam and Eve made their way there after being exiled from Eden. Here, at the place that eventually became the town of Menton, Eve took out a lemon she had stolen from the garden; she planted its seeds and in the sheltered coastal valley, they thrived. Certainly lemons thrive in Menton today and, off hand the legend is hard to discount.

 

Menton is tangibly ancient. Certainly it was already established in 600 B.C. when the Greeks established their first trading post at nearby Marseilles. The Greeks brought the olives, grapevines, fig trees and almonds that eventually became the backbone of Provençale cooking, and indeed Provençale culture; but lemons were already firmly entrenched. 

When I visited the place with my wife and our then three-year-old son back in 1993, I became enamored of the Provencale version of a lemon meringue pie, the tarte au citron. Made with a very buttery and intense lemon curd, the French version of this timeless dessert was a revelation at the time, and for years, I turned up my nose at the lighter and more pedestrian American version in which the lemon filling is lightened with water and thickened with cornstarch.

But recently, I was visiting family in Florida. My mother passed away there just after Valentine’s Day. My brother took me to an abandoned citrus orchard, and when I got back to the house, I made an old-fashioned American-style lemon meringue pie, just like Mom used to make. Suddenly, the old seemed new again. Nothing would do but to have the familiar taste of childhood, an era somehow more ancient, more mysterious and more unattainable than even the Garden of Eden.

Lemon Meringue Pie
 
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