I ask because I don't know: is there a difference between regular Lime Pie and Key Lime Pie?

Mmmmm.

This sounds like a cross between my lemon meringue pie and my key lime pie.

In learning to make the Key lime pie, I discovered that the standard lime is called a Persian lime.

Key lime pie is made with sweetened condensed milk and egg yolks. Usually no meringue, but there are many, many variations.

Despite what the purists say, I've been happy with a Persian substitution version of the Key lime pie.

It sounds completely delicious.

I kind of expect a Jim Macdonald recipe to include lines like "Bake in a moderate oven for 15 minutes. WARNING: if you take it out of the oven too early, it will explode and rip all the skin from your face. I have seen this happen."

Dammit! Did I forget the nitro?

The missing step: Fold in one quarter cup of nitroglycerine. Carefully.

Okay, seriously:

WARNING: Unless you do everything perfectly you will wind up with Lime Soup. Delicous Lime Soup, true, but still ... lime soup.

I have seen this happen.

Is this the lime pie that's like a short story?

Oh, lovely: Lime Soup for dessert. With vanilla ice cream?

This is the Lime Pie that is exactly like a short story.

Q: How is a Lime Pie like a short story?
A: Because a raven is like a writing-desk.

I've tried to explain that parallel about a half-dozen times now, including to my current workshop group, and can never quite do it justice. But it sure hit home for me.

(There have been a couple of times I've reached the three-quarter mark or so in some new piece and thought, "This is about to be lime-flavored scrambled eggs. Time to wash the pan and start over." So, er, thanks. I think.)

Key limes are very tiny little limes about the size of a ping pong ball. Supposedly they have a qualitatively different flavor from your standard (Persian) lime, but I may not have delicate enough tastebuds to discern. I will say that grating peel on key limes is a tricky, and sometimes bloody, proposition (which gives Jim his opening for first aid instructions for lime-graters).

Of course, lime soup sounds like the perfect setup for a venture into molecular gastronomy and spherification: http://hungryinhogtown.typepad.com/

James @ 9... This is the Lime Pie that is exactly like a short story

What would be the equivalent of a fantasy trilogy?

Sounds lovely. The only nicer way to combat scurvy would be limeade.

Some first-aid suggestions: (1) Lime juice in a cut stings. (2) In the process of removing peel from several limes, one can crack the skin under one's fingernails. See (1).

I discovered this the hard way while developing a revised version of my hot pepper jelly recipe. At least I was smart enough to wear gloves while handling the peppers.

What would be the equivalent of a fantasy trilogy?

Maybe something like this?

Do you know how many limes give two and a half tablespoons of rind? That would be Persian limes (I guess, never having seen Limes advertised by variety in the UK).

Some of the comments here are reminding me irresistably of Neil Diamond's "Porcupine Pie"!

Neil #17: Persian limes are now the default lime. I think Key limes (Citrus aurantifolia) are also called Mexican limes and/or West Indian limes in the UK. Don't know where to buy them, but this information may expand your search results.

What I'd like to find, in the US on a regular basis, is lime marmalade.

Any suggestions on how to go about cooling it (to "serve cold") without making the meringue weep?

I hate weepy meringues.

I've tried this recipe twice and ended up with lime soup each time. Clearly I did something wrong; unfortunately, I can't tell what.

Could I suggest that, while this might be the recipe for the best lime pie in the world, its lack of robustness means that it is not the best lime pie recipe in the world?

Neil Willcox @ 17... A chicken within a duck within a turkey? Ewww...

Tracie #19 -- Rose's Lime marmalade is widely available on the East Coast. It's pretty good, if sweet. Here in Boston, I see Dundee's often.

Madeleine Robins @ 12: I will say that grating peel on key limes is a tricky, and sometimes bloody, proposition (which gives Jim his opening for first aid instructions for lime-graters).

Good tools make all the difference, in my experience. I haven't grated my knuckles once since acquiring my fine Microplane grater. I'd hate to have to go back to using the typical dull "zester" section on a standard grater.

Serge #22:

They make appearances every Thanksgiving. I knew we were all doomed when the local FancyFoods had frozen ones. (If I'm crazy enough to do a T-Bird, it's cornish game hen.)

I rely on American Spoon, in Michigan, for lemon- and lime-flavored spreads, but I imprinted on their lemon curd so I am heavily biased. They're at spoon.com and a variety of Michigan shops.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks as though the meringue shell would still be unstable. Does the extra 15 minutes baking with the filling in somehow firm it up? (And what exactly does the baking powder do: produce tiny little bubbles?)

My own variations would be either a graham-cracker crust (traditional for these things) or pre-made individual meringue shells of the just about rock-hard variety.

I'm only moderately worried about getting filling instead of soup, as I have a very low gas flame, and excellent double boiler, and lots of success w/ zabaglione.

Andrew@#21: It's not a lime pie recipe for someone who doesn't already have practice making custard fillings that don't turn into soup, which is why I'm not the person in my family who makes it. I suspect that a certain number of soupy failures are necessary before a reasonable expectation of success can be obtained; how this is like writing a short story can be left as an exercise for the reader.

This is a delicious recipe, but not a particularly forgiving one.

Jim Macdonald @6 -- When I was about 13, I discovered a recipe for peppermint meringues, and tried to make them. I learned the hard way that the recipe had evidently not been kitchen-tested. They had you adding the peppermint extract to the unbeaten egg whites, and then beating them into a meringue.

I ended up with a large bowl full of peppermint-sugar-egg soup. I tried eating it anyway, but it was too strong, and gave me a stomachache.

This is where I learned how fragile the physics of egg foams can be.

joann @ 27... the meringue shell would still be unstable

"Captain! I don't know if I can hold it together much longer!"
"Scottie, I need that shell."
"Captain, I cannae change the laws of physics."

Neil, Serge

Did you follow the link to the Whole Stuffed Camel?

I wonder if there's any significance in the fact that the recipe comes from someone named "Shararazod".

WRT #s 17 & 22: I want a duck in a chicken in a turkey in a sheep in a cow.

I confess that my recipe for lemon pie has half as many egg yolks and has 3 tablespoons of -horrors- corn starch, which forces things to set. I usually make it in a large (10 inch) pie pan, so I increase everything by 1/3 (to a half cup juice, 4 yolks, etc.)

In Key lime pie, the juice reacts with the sweetened condensed milk to set nicely without cooking. I do heat the yolks in the microwave to avoid salmonella, mixing it with the lime juice before heating to prevent the yolk from hardening.

Fragano,

It's starting to sound like the children's song about the old lady who swallowed a fly.

"There was an old cow who swallowed a sheep.
I don't know why she swallowed a sheep,
perhaps she's asleep?"

Of course this is swallowing things in reverse order from the old lady, but you'd think stuffing a turkey with a sheep would be tight fit.

I'd like to try turducken, but I can never get the damn chicken to eat the duck.

My mother's mother had a lemon pie recipe where the filling involved not only the separated eggs, but also a half-cup of flour. It wasn't a custard pie, but more like a chiffon cake, and could also be done without the pastry shell.

I think the meringue should should be stable for long enough. The finished pie shouldn't be around for more than a day.

PJEvans #36:

My notion of stable is not "not weeping", but rather "can I lift a piece out of the pan in one, er, piece?"

As Dan points out, the other failure mode for this pie is a plate of lime-flavored scrambled eggs.

The shell is the part of this confection that's closest to foolproof.

Some people cheat by adding an amount of unflavored gelatin. Others cheat by adding an amount of potato starch. People who do either of those things should be aware that they're cheating.

Bruce #34:

Isn't it the other way round? Sheep eats turkey?

joann, that was what I meant. It will probably start weeping after the first day - not the shell, I don't think, because it will be fairly dry after being run through the oven twice. (Think of the meringues sold like cookies. They're thoroughly dried in the oven.)

(H*ll, my grandmother's (this is my father's mother) lemon meringue pie wept. And she was good at it. I'd like to have seen what she would have done with this recipe.)

joann @ 39

That's the funny thing about the song. The old lady swallows a fly, and it doesn't agree with her, so she swallows a spider to eat the fly. That doesn't work, so after a few more iterations she's swallowing a horse, and then who knows what all. I was pointing out that going that way leads to popping seams.

I'll tell you though, if I can find a big enough roasting pit, I'm really tempted to try out the stuffed camel. I need 80 to 100 friends to finish it off. Volunteers?

The only time I've seen this pie made, it was neither like soup nor like lime-flavored scrambled eggs, and the meringue shell was the part that failed.

(Moral: don't trust the oven thermostats at the Island Inn on Martha's Vineyard.)

PJEvans #40: Think of the meringues sold like cookies. They're thoroughly dried in the oven.

Generally they take at least two hours at an incredibly low temperature.

That's why I was thinking individual commercial shells--they're about 4-5" in diameter, beautifully piped, and perfectly oven-dried.

"Fold hot lime mixture into half the egg white meringue; fill [cooled] pre-baked pieshell."

Jim, is the temperature important? When making lemon meringue pie with a sweet pastry crust, I've found that adding hot lemon to hot crust works, but hot lemon to cooled crust makes for a soggy weepy pie. Does adding hot lime mixture to cooled pieshell work better than hot lime to hot pieshell or cooled lime to cooled pieshell?

Did anyone else read post 40 as a response to post 39?

I couldn't figure out why a sheep would start weeping a day after eating a turkey. An act of contrition? Or is it just indigestion?

Fragano @ 32: You left out the goat. Or are you saving it for curry?

FranW @ 44

Well, you couldn't let it cool much, or it would set before you got it into the shell. (The joy of custard-based filling!)

joann @ 43

45 minutes at 300F ought to leave it well set, then getting run through again with the filling - I think the inside of the shell would be chewy, though. (The recipes I've seen for meringues say 200-250F, a very very slow oven, for two or three hours. Kind of like applesauce-cinnamon ornaments.) But for individual tarts, yeah, if you can get ready-made shells ...

I'm starting to get hungry for lime pie.

Caroline #29: This is where I learned how fragile the physics of egg foams can be.

One of the most evil things affecting egg foams (egg white division) is cleanliness of the tools. Even a smudge of greasiness can make the whites never beat up correctly. Since liquid detergents contain glycerine, wash your bowl and tools with dishwasher soap.

(This advice also useful for champagne glasses. Bubbles, it seems, come from little scratches on the glass; the glycerine fills them in and the bubbles happen less. Do your champers glasses in the dishwasher. I read somewhere that one wine-glass maker had specially-scratched glasses in the design stage.)

Joann @ 47: One of the most evil things affecting egg foams (egg white division) is cleanliness of the tools. Even a smudge of greasiness can make the whites never beat up correctly. Since liquid detergents contain glycerine, wash your bowl and tools with dishwasher soap.

Also, I *think* it was Harold McGee who tested the old saw about using a copper bowl and found that it was true after all-- the foam gets stabilized by some sort of interaction with the metal ions. (Whoever it was, IIRC (s)he also tried a sterling silver bowl, thanks to a friend who had an heirloom sterling silver bowl large enough to beat eggwhites in. The mind boggles.)

What I've wondered ever since reading this is, so why doesn't anyone make copper *whisks*?

I've heard you should never use plastic bowls for meringue. The plastic is never clean enough, once it's been used for anything with fat.

My Parents claim to have gone to a feast in Tunisia where there was a camel stuffed with a sheep stuffed with etc. etc. stuffed with a fish stuffed with an egg. My Dad apparently got a portion with a sheeps eye.

Sometime later I was born, and their stories seem to have been a lot less interesting after that*. What exactly this tells us I don't know.

* Except the story about how I somersaulted off the bed and landed on my head at the age of 9 months

Can the filling be cooked (carefully, at low power) in a microwave oven rather than in a double boiler? I usually melt chocolate that way, where recipes call for the double boiler, and also cook things like puddings in the microwave.

I suspect they don't make copper whisks because someone would be sure to use it on tomato or lemon or something else acidic and it'd be VILE.

Plus, copper wire is soft and flexible and you'd have a very munged-up whisk before long.

It might be worth trying to make one of your own... if you actually WANT to whip egg whites by hand. Me, I let the KitchenAid do it. I don't have the 5-quart model for which you can buy the copper bowl liner for egg whites, but a pinch of cream of tartar works just fine.

Although it's absolutely possible to use a drop of dishwashing soap to replace egg whites, for those times when you suddenly discover that you've only got 4 instead of 6 for a cake, I've found that most folk don't like being -told- about the similar characteristics of soap and egg whites...

You can't taste the soap though...

Although it's absolutely possible to use a drop of dishwashing soap to replace egg whites, for those times when you suddenly discover that you've only got 4 instead of 6 for a cake, I've found that most folk don't like being -told- about the similar characteristics of soap and egg whites...

You can't taste the soap though...

1. Masochism is trying to turn whipping cream into whipped cream inside Cheyenne Mountain using a tableware place setting knife instead of a whip or eggbeater... it takes more than an hour, maybe more than two hours. I don't remember how long it took.

2. How could that possible be a Real Recipe to a Navy vet, where's the booze??!!!

3. The Market Basket five miles north of Mall Road on 3A (that is, five miles north of the hotel that Readercon;s in) tends to carry Key limes in bags of a pound. There's a closer but smaller Market Basket, on the Middlesex Turnpike in Burlington south of 128 (makes it about a mile and a half from the Marriott) but I don't know if it usually had key limes (and there are at least two more Market Baskets within ten miles of the Marriott, also a Shaw's a mile or so north of the hotel, a Roche Brothers' a half mile or so south of the hotel, a Stop & Shop two mines east, and a Trader Joe's with a mile and a half, north of the Market Basket in Burlington)

Oh, the Stop & Shop sometimes has Buddha's Hand citrons... but at $8.99 or so each.

Joel #51, I would be wary. I think the microwave would heat the custard unevenly, which would give you a higher chance of curdling. I too skip using double boilers most of the time and just cook carefully in a pot on stovetop. This does not work, however, for 7-minute icing, so I use a stainless steel bowl set on a pot of water.

Tracie @ # 19: As dsr mentioned, my local grocery store (Publix) carries this, and so does the Kroger down the street. (I live in Georgia).

Bruce @ #41, I'll pass. I know a camel personally (his name is Niles) and I don't think I could bring myself to regard his ilk as food.

Rikibeth @ 52

I actually have a 5-quart Kitchenaid (in one of the Magic Boxes, but I know which one and where it is) but not the liner. My mother wasn't into meringues and never got a copper liner, and she found out by trying that the newer bowls aren't exactly the same size as the older ones (ISTR she got a bowl shield and it didn't fit). So I'd be doing without. On the other hand, I have plenty of cream of tartar.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #34: One could treat it as a problem in topology (a subject about which I am completely ignorant).

Howard Peirce #45: Of course I am.

#52 : copper wire is soft and flexible and you'd have a very munged-up whisk before long.

You could solve that with a copper plated whisk. Wouldn't help with the using it on acid things problem, but you would have thought people buying something specifically for egg whisking would be able to avoid that - after all, they buy copper bowls.

#12, #19: I had heard that what gives Key limes their distinctive flavor is growing in salty soil, such as found in the Florida Keys. I can tell the difference between Key lime pie made with the real thing and Klp made with other limes.

joann @47: Oh yes, I learned about grease around the same time. Ever since then I go nuts scrubbing the bowl and beaters before attempting meringue.

Julie L @48: It was McGee, because I read that page recently. He found that copper and silver bowls (he says he used a silver-plated bowl) are both good for egg foams because the metals block sulfur reactions between the egg proteins. (For those playing along at home, the experiment is described on page 104 of my 2004 edition.)

Paula @55: I once started making szarlotka, and had sliced and cooked all the apples and prepared the dough, before realizing that my beaters had gone missing in the last move. I cussed and got out the whisk. Luckily I had about five friends over that afternoon, and we took turns whipping egg whites while gossiping pleasantly. It took probably an hour.

If I'd only had a knife I might have just given up. I am in awe of your dedication.

Digression: The szarlotka recipes I can find online don't require meringue, but the recipe handed down from my best friend's grandmother has three parts: pastry dough with three kinds of fat, cooked unsweetened sliced apples, and meringue on top. Then you cover the meringue with little balls of pastry dough and bake the whole shebang.

The original recipe, written in Polish in a hand so fine as to be almost unreadable, called for "three glasses of flour." "Oh, I know which glasses she meant," said my friend's mother, and returned with an old glass teacup. A further section of the recipe said "add flour, as much as it takes."

My translated (that is, transcribed from my friend's mother's verbal translation, since my ability to read Polish is extremely limited) and somewhat standardized version, scribbled in a small notebook, is one of my most treasured recipes.

The best lemon filling, my mother's recipe from a Southern family connection, thickens with four slices of bread (crusts cut off) torn fine, with two cups of boiling water poured over them. (Also uses lemon extract in addition to the two lemons.) Available on demand -- I give it to anyone who expresses the slightest interest, terrified that the house will burn down and I'll lose it. Cornstarch? What cornstarch?

Neil Willcox @ 17: As one reference point, I just zested what I would describe as a medium-sized Persian lime with a Microplane grater. That gave me about three tablespoons of very fluffy zest.

Thanks Joel. I'll undoubtedly experiment myself, but I'd just been to the farm shop for the week before reading this, and have far too many lemons to use up.

Thanks Joel. I'll undoubtedly experiment myself, but I'd just been to the farm shop for the week before reading this, and have far too many lemons to use up.

Ew. Spam and lime pie. I'm going to go eat some real chocolate to wash the taste out of my brain.

Someone uptopic was asking for a good source for lime marmalade:

Red Lime Marmalade is available from Cheri's Desert Harvest, which produces Southwestern specialties for mail order and at some Southwestern gift shops.

Rather pricey, but damn good; the taste is slightly different from traditional lime marmalade. (Better, imho.)

Their Margarita Marmalade is also excellent.

Mary Aileen @ #62: It's not just a matter of tilth; key limes are a different species than the limes normally spotted in the produce aisle. They're smaller, not as intensely green, with much thinner skin (which means they don't store as well). Their flavor is rounder, less spiky, than regular limes, and they're well worth seeking out. I've spotted them recently at Trader Joe's in Manhattan.

albertina (70): I know Key limes are a different species, but my understanding is that they taste much more like regular limes when grown in non-salty soil.

Or I could have been misinformed all these years.

I've been reading up on meringue in some of my cookbooks. What I'm gathering is that it really is a matter of getting it exactly right. The eggs are supposed to be at room temperature (they probably mean about 70F); if they're beaten too little the meringue will weep; if they're beaten too much the meringue will weep... I didn't see anything about the phase of the moon, but it may come into play somewhere.

(For the curious: the French Chef Cookbook and Cook It Right by Anne Willans, which has pictures to identify correct, under, and over.)

what does beat eggs until light and frothy mean

joan @73:
More than you ever wanted to know about beating eggs.

I'm quite hungry actually.

Gabrielle, what gives? I don't think you're a spambot, but why go to all these ancient threads, some more than a year old, and post one comment in each?

PJ Evans @72:

In my limited experience, I've found that it works o.k. if the egg whites are slightly cold (I got impatient). But any yolk contamination and the egg whites won't form stiff peaks.

Soon Lee #77:

In my experience (and reading) it's not just yolk contamination, but any kind of fat. Even mixer blades washed with a glycerine-based liquid. (Always wash egg-beating blades in the dishwasher with powder.)

Back in our just-out-of-college days, my housemate was making whipped cream. I wasn't really paying attention until he said "that's funny, there are little yellow flecks in it," at which point I yelled "STOP!"

He had beaten egg whites before, you see, and the more you beat them the stiffer they get. He had quite an interesting expression as I explained to him where butter comes from.

At that point you tell him to keep going, the cream is doomed; but you get nice butter.

:)

#77 and 78
Why I don't use plastic bowls for meringues. You can never get plastic clean enough once it's had any fat or oil on it.

Gabrielle posting,
Threads resuscitating.