Lemon Meringue Pie: A Lesson in Love, Hate and Bravery

There it is, a single perfect slice on a plate, enough noon light coming through the windows of the café to make the yellow lemon layer glow and brown-tipped waves of meringue as high as my pinky finger shine ethereally, a thick cloud of dream foam.

It’s lemon meringue pie, and I despise it on sight.

It isn’t the lemon, most beloved of all flavors to me, even above chocolate. Hand me a slice of icebox lemon pie with whipped cream or a pan of lemon squares and I might not wait for a fork.

The problem is the meringue. I’m good with crispy meringue, like Pavlovas and those little cookies you dry in the oven overnight. The trouble is soft meringue, the kind made from egg whites and boiling syrup. Just the thought of forcing a forkful into my mouth brings a gag response, built on years of hating the not-solid/not-liquid sensation. 

It brings up more than disgust: Guilt, that I’m a Southern food writer who can’t abide a classic of the Southern baking arts. Sadness, that I could never appreciate my late mother’s lemon meringue pie, allegedly one of her highest achievements. 

And there’s another layer of emotions under there, as important to the proceeding as my mother’s flaky pie crust. That layer is all mixed up with love, and trust, and the lesson in bravery my parents taught me. 

Like my only other food hate, liver, I test myself every decade or so. Our tastes change as we grow and sometimes things we hated as children suddenly click: Mayonnaise, plain buttered rice and grits were all suspect to me once, but all worked their way into my palate as I grew. 

I’ve reached a détente with chicken livers. Hate them fried, love them passionately as chicken liver pate or mousse.

But not the lemon meringue pie. 

The last time I gave it a try was a decade ago in a classic meat-and-three in Albemarle, N.C., the Rosebriar Restaurant, famous for housemade pies and particularly for lemon meringue with a layer of meringue at least twice as deep as the lemon filling under it. 

As a food editor on assignment, I treated the pie with respect: Ordered it, admired it, took a picture of it. I interviewed the restaurant’s owner and wrote a column about it. Before doing all that, though, I took one bite. Nope, still couldn’t swallow it. 

Food can be fraught when you have parents who knew hunger. Both of my parents, born in Georgia in the 1920s, knew shortages in the ‘30s, nights of government cheese, plain boxes of spaghetti with no sauce or butter, squirrels brought back from the woods. 

For actual starvation though, we had our father, the Marine veteran who came back from the South Pacific with no physical wounds, just emotional ones, shoals mostly hidden by his cheerful zest for life that could surface suddenly and dangerously. 

My father’s experience with starvation was the stuff of actual history books: Dropped on a swampy mess in the Solomon Islands called Guadalcanal with limited supplies for what was supposed to be a short battle with the Japanese, it turned into a six-month slog and a standoff between the U.S. and Japanese navies, leaving 6,000 or so Marines and a few thousand Japanese soldiers scrambling with so little food, they turned desperate. 

My father survived with a disturbing nostalgia for grilled snake – even my food-adventurous mother wouldn’t indulge him in that one – and stories of getting so hungry, he and his buddies once went back to a Japanese encampment they had captured weeks before. When they had originally taken it, they had piled up the captured stores of rice and pissed on it, their idea of a protest  against General Tojo. When they returned, just to check, the pile of rice was inedible, of course, laced with blue mold and maggots. They still dug into the center of the mound, just to check.

Being a picky eater didn’t carry much weight with my dad. If you said you couldn’t eat something, he would pin you down with a hot stare and declare: “If you’re hungry enough, you can eat anything. You can eat bugs. You can eat rats. I know.” 

Try arguing with that when you’re 7 and you don’t want to drink your milk. 

After a few epic battles over liver, Dad and I established peace over food. I was mostly willing to try anything once. And no lemon meringue pie for me meant more for him, so we could co-exist. 

But all peace requires a test.

In our Florida suburb, our family stuck out for our sheer Southern-ness, a trait beloved by our neighbors, Fred and Pearl Townsend. Fred and Pearl were retired people and actual snowbirds: They had a home in Canada where they retreated in the summer, and a stucco house right next to us for the winter. 

They loved our Southern ways – our boiled peanuts, our spare ribs, our barbecue. They loved everything about us – my dad and his big-hearted embrace for life, my mother and her cooking, my brother and his motorcycles, my own gawky adolescence. 

Fred and Pearl were getting on in years, so when I was 14, Dad roped me into tackling the hedge between our houses, climbing up and down a ladder all day to trim it up. Neighborliness  has its reward, so Fred and Pearl invited my parents and I for dinner. 

I made sure to sit up straight and remember my “sir’s” and “ma’am’s.” I cleaned my plate as expected. And then Pearl announced she had a surprise, she had worked on it all day, and she hoped it lived up to our Southern standards. And she stepped out of the kitchen with a lemon meringue pie. 

My parents heaped her with compliments. And they fixed me under their steady gaze, the one that says “you know how you were raised.” 

I did. I said, “thank you, ma’am,” picked up my fork and went to work. I fought back the gags and ate as steadily as I could, trying to breathe through my mouth and focus on reaching the crust. The whole time, my parents covered for me by keeping up a steady stream of “mmms” and compliments, trying to divert attention from my struggle. 

Once, pausing to let the gorge settle, I looked up and saw them both looking at me. To this day, when I think of what it means to be looked at with love, I think of that moment. They were both gazing at me with pride and unspoken encouragement. They knew how hard that slice was for me, how hard it is to choke down something while appearing to enjoy it. 

With their eyes on me, that silent rain of praise and pride, I got through the slice. Even picked up the crust crumbs with my fork. 

And Pearl stood up, saying how much she loved watching me eat, and declared: “I know what you want.” She cut another slice, bigger than the first, and plopped it on my plate. 

I looked down and knew I was defeated. I couldn’t do it again. I just couldn’t. And that’s when my father picked up his fork, making up a joke about trying to guard that pie from him, and reached across the table. My mother joined in, insisting she couldn’t resist another bite and taking three. 

My parents teamed up and made that pie go away so smoothly, Pearl never guessed a thing.

So what did I learn that night? I learned that you can do anything if you have to. And I learned that if you try hard enough, the people who love you will know it and hold you up through the last steps. I learned that love doesn’t have to speak, it just has to act.

Yeah, it’s a sentiment as sticky sweet as a slice of goddamn lemon meringue pie. But at least I didn’t have to eat a rat.