Lemon Meringue Pie

In our family, when it was your birthday you had your favorite things to eat. One February, for his birthday, Dad wanted his favorite pie – lemon meringue.
Mother didn’t often make pies. She usually made homemade cookies or cake for dessert after dinner. A cake or a batch of cookies would last all week, doled out just a little bit to each of us every day.
The kitchen in the house on Spring Valley was small. In the narrow room right inside the back door was the stove and sink. But there wasn’t room for a refrigerator in that room, so the refrigerator was in the dining room. This was at best inconvenient and Mother, who didn’t like cooking anyway, fussed a lot when she was fixing dinner. I usually tried to be outside or upstairs when she was cooking. When I got caught downstairs, I was expected to bring things from the refrigerator to the kitchen, or to take things from the kitchen back to the refrigerator. But on the day she made the pie, I stayed in the kitchen to watch. I sat on a red stool with steps that folded up inside.
The lemon meringue pie took all afternoon to make. First the pie shell had to be made and baked. Then the lemons had to be juiced. The eggs had to be divided into whites in one bowl and yolks in another. The custard filling was cooked over a double boiler before it went into the pie crust. The meringue had to be whipped up carefully and spread on the top just so. It went into the oven to bake slowly and was checked carefully so that the meringue didn’t get chewy. What a lot of work!
This pie came out perfectly. The meringue stood in little peaks with tiny drops of brown on their slopes.
I was excited that night when dessert was served. How would that pie taste? All those bitter lemons in it (I’d touched my tongue to one after it was juiced) – would it be sweet? I took a bite. Oh yum! It was sweet and just a bit tart at the same time, and the meringue was like eating clouds. Sweet sugary clouds. Delicious! Dad loved his birthday treat. We ate up that whole pie.
“Can we have it again?” Joe B. and I begged.
Mother was a little huffy. “All that work and it’s gone in one meal” she said. “I just can’t see that it’s worth it.”
It was a long time before she made another lemon meringue pie. Maybe that is why the taste of it sticks in my memory as one of the great treats of all time.