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.

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

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.

(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.)

What would be the equivalent of a fantasy trilogy?

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.

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).

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

I hate weepy meringues.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

"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."

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".

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.

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

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

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.

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

(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.)

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?

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.)

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*?

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

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.

You can't taste the soap though...

You can't taste the soap though...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Or I could have been misinformed all these years.

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

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.

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.)

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.

:)