Lemon Pie Chronicles

I completed a long and complex journey this weekend, a journey that started about fifteen years ago and led me through several kitchens, some tears and the briefest of brushes with internet pornography.

I hold a deeply-cherished belief that homemade food is almost always superior to store-bought, or as we called it when I was a kid, 'boughten'. The one exception of course, is the Oreo, which is a 'boughten' food with its very own special category of deliciousness.

I expounded on this belief in a heated discussion one day way back in the 90s, holding forth that surely, somewhere, there must be a recipe that would rival the old standby for lemon pie, the one that comes in a box. My co-arguers were not moved despite my passion, which is how I ended up on this decades-long quest for a perfect lemon pie from lemons and not from a box.

My first stop was the then-nascent Internet. Keep in mind, it was the 90s. There were no parental controls, and only the very nerdiest of the science dweebs knew what a googol was or that it might become Google. I'll never forget my father's laugh when I told him about the porn I was blasted with after I typed into the search engine, "lemon pie". The women were all outfitted in yellow bikinis on the opening pages. "Cherry pie", by the way, at the time, would get you ladies in red bikinis. I'm so happy the 'net has progressed.

This weekend, four kitchens and nearly two dozen recipes later, I believe I may have finally nailed it. I have tried many, many variations and permutations of lemon pie filling over the years, some too runny, some too stiff, some not lemony enough, some with flat meringue, I was starting to think I had been wrong in that long-ago discussion and "the crap from the box" might actually be as good as it gets.

But I finally turned to a book from the 80s, and I believe I have won my self-imposed challenge.

For my two Thanksgiving dinners this weekend, I made pies from a book my mother had given me when I was 16 and not prone to listening to her advice in the kitchen or anywhere else. The recipe from Better Homes and Gardens calls for a teaspoon of lemon zest and 1/3 cup of fresh-squeezed lemon juice. I doubled both while reducing amount of water called for and used the pastry recipe from Joy of Cooking. Three whites in the meringue.

Here's how I know it was a success: after each dinner, I was banned from taking my leftovers home. Oh, I was welcome to take home the pan, but as we cleaned up after the meal in each house, there was no question that final slice was going anywhere but into my hosts' tummy.

Fifteen or sixteen years, probably about 20 recipes and finally, I win. I wasn't up against anything but my personal lemon pie beliefs, and you can call me tenacious, stubborn or willful, I don't care because I was right: there is indeed, a homemade lemon pie much, much better than boughten.