The lime that is key to a truly great pie
It is hard to get your hands on fresh Key limes outside of the Americas and the Caribbean. Memories of limes hanging both in clusters and ripe and fallen in the front yards of houses fronting the sandy streets of Florida’s Estero Beach torment me. So here I am in England, pestering my local fruit and vegetable stallholders to look for them on their pre-dawn trips to London wholesalers because I can no longer easily buy bottles of Nellie & Joe’s Key lime juice online (and that was always my adequate sub-in for the real, fresh thing even though an imported bottle costs about eleven million pounds).
What makes the Key Lime a valuable and costly fruit is its small yield of juice: 10-18 of the fruits are needed to produce one small cup. (The weightier Persian lime yields 2-3 tablespoons of juice from just one fruit.) And what juice the Key lime has. Both tawny and sharp in flavour, I think of it as lime with a sunburn, its acidity the equivalent of standing under the needles of a warm power shower after you’ve spent too long in the sun. And you also have the aromatic oils contained within its fragile rind, which itself turns a shade of arylide yellow when fully ripe ((known as ‘yallery’ by locals in Estero).
The journey from tree to plate is hard-won. First, workers harvest the fruit wearing thick leather gauntlets (if they are lucky enough to be given them) to protect against the vicious thorns. Twiggy stems flex, pierce, and spike the fruit pickers as they lean into the tree’s crown where some of the best, sun-ripened fruit can be found. Then, once on the chopping board, there is another battle with flesh that defies being cut into neat segments and a centre dense with seeds. Sadly, commercial production of Key limes across the south of Florida and its west coast islands near Fort Myers and Estero Beach, along with the Keys, was halted by the 1926 hurricane, which wiped out the citrus groves along with substantial acreage of pineapple plantations. The growers replanted with Persian lime trees, which are easier to grow and pick and sturdier to transport because of their thicker skin. The peel of the Key lime, by contrast, lacks the toughness and verdancy of its Persian cousin although it is deeply aromatic.
It is not so easy to get a slice of Key Lime Pie made with the real thing in Florida these days. As Raymond Sokolov wrote in Fading Feast:
” I drove down from Miami, impelled by a lifelong desire to taste an authentic Key Lime Pie. So as I crossed the last bridge from Stock Island onto Key West, I assumed I was only minutes from enjoying a rich slice of Florida’s most famous regional speciality. But after a week of stuffing down piece after piece of one so-called Key Lime Pie after another, I came to realise that probably none of these pies contained a single drop of freshly squeezed juice. Indeed, after some serious enquiry among local experts, I am now morally certain that virtually all ‘Key Lime Pies’ are actually made with the juice of the Tahiti (or Persian or Bearss) lime, which is not a true lime at all.”
Sokolov was not alone in his concerns, and earlier attempts to ratify the pie’s ingredients had been made by the state government in 1965 when Bernie Papy Jr introduced legislation calling for a $100 fine to be ‘levied against anyone advertising Key Lime Pie which was not made with the real fruit.’ Then in 1994, the State Legislature officially recognized the pie as ‘an important symbol of Florida’ even though North Floridian lawmakers had argued against this, calling instead for the pecan pie, with nuts are grown in-state, to be afforded this recognition. Finally, in July 2006, House Bill 453 and Senate Bill 676 of the Florida Legislature’s Regular 2006 Session made the pie the official Florida state pie (and who doesn’t love the idea of a state pie?) Unsurprisingly the bill was not passed.
The thinner the skin, the juicier the pulp is a good rule of thumb, and the best limes have a rind that can be pierced with a sharp thumbnail and scraped back sans knife if necessary, something appreciated by the conch divers of Florida. These divers have Anglo Saxon and Bahamian descent and now live in the Keys, eking a living from the archipelago waters by turtling, fishing and sponging. On days when the wind is ‘walking right,’ the waters become ‘as crystal as gin’ (Conch speak) and the spongers, peering through buckets with a glass base, bring up sponges and conchs from depths as great as 60 feet although many of them also free dive. Some eat their conch raw, bouncing the glutinous, milky flesh around their mouths after using a knife blade to enter the shell and sever the muscle that binds it. Then, grasping the muscly protruding heel of the flesh, they draw it out and slice it into thin, gelatinous sashimi that quivers as it is prepared. Seasoning can be as simple as a dip in the seawater over the side of the boat or a squirt of Key lime juice, which cooks in the manner of ceviche.
Alongside the conch, another popular fish is the ‘Grunt.’ so-called because of the noise this small bottom feeder emits as it is pulled from the deep. (The poor thing; I’d grunt too.) Being rather tiny, a considerable number are required to make a meal, and after flash-frying, they are eaten with a seasoning of ‘sour,’ the name for the bottled Key lime juice that is squirted onto them. First, their heads are whipped off between finger and thumb, and after some dextrous plucking, the cerebral cavity of the grunt is exposed so the brains can be sucked out, followed by the nibbling away of the crust, strips of dorsal flesh, tails and fins. These are nose to tail eating, leaving little behind- not even enough for Hemingway’s famous polydactyl cats that prowl the island.
Years ago, the sponge and conch fishers would have to remain at sea for some time and rations aboard could have included sweetened, condensed milk and key limes alongside eggs foraged from seabirds. The condensed milk was created in 1856 by Gail Borden to compensate for the lack of refrigeration and its popularity with soldiers during the Civil War created a ready post-war market helped by the fact that until the opening of the Overseas Highway in 1930, tank trucks could not safely transport ice, milk and refrigerated goods to the Keys. The terrain of the Florida Keys is not conducive to cattle farming; indeed, a lot of the state is not, being largely reclaimed swamp and old Native American hunting grounds, and historically, dairy was not a food group easily available to people living there. So condensed milk, those foraged eggs, and Key limes handily made up the ‘trinity’ of the pie- but how we got from this larder of ingredients to the finished pie is unclear. Did sponge harvesters soak leftover Cuban bread with the milk, top it with an egg, then use lime juice to ‘cook’ the concoction, as historian Tom Hambright claims?
So, the classic Key lime Pie origins are not conclusive, with stories seeming apocryphal at best, downright presumptuous at worst. However, the first written reference to this pie that I can trace is in some of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) writings published in the 1930s. Set up to create employment for unemployed writers during the Great Depression, the WPA created many art-related programs to relieve artists, writers and theatrical professionals, including the Federal Writers Project. In the later years of the programme, writers were sent out on assignments with photographers to document American eating.
Not a cookbook (in fact, cookbook writers were banned from contributing), but rather ‘an account of group eating as an important American social institution and its part in the development of American cookery as an authentic art’, the WPA writers filed thousands of stories that captured, as never before, the role food played in the moulding of American society, from possum dinners at Elk Lodges to the conch and Key lime juice-eating fishers and divers of this old Spanish colony dangling off the right-hand side of the contiguous United States.
A ‘Promotional’ from the WPA, published in the 1930s, mentions the “world-famous” key lime pie, yet a cookbook by the Key West Woman’s Club published nearly ten years earlier in 1920 omits any mention of the recipe. Locals state that this may be due to the ubiquity of the pie being such that the editors felt nobody required a written recipe (the teaching granny to suck eggs defence), but this doesn’t make sense when you consider that most Little League cookbooks feature their regions most popular and iconic recipes. Can you imagine a Charleston Little League cookbook without a recipe for benne wafers, pecan pralines and she-crab soup or its Texan equivalent without a recipe for a bowl of red? Additionally, when it comes to a famous recipe and a vital part of regional cuisine, everybody thinks their recipe is the definitive one. I find it hard to believe that the Key West Woman’s Club recipe book editors owned egos immune to such fancies.
Local Keys history tells that sometime towards the end of the 1800s, a prominent resident of Key West named William Curry, a Bahamian born immigrant to the USA who went on to become Florida’s first millionaire via his ship salvaging business, employed a cook called ‘Aunt Sally,’ also from the Bahamas, who is said to have created the first Key lime Pie from the fruit. The story of how the recipe arose does not appear terribly likely because of the odd thing that happens when you combine lime juice and sweetened condensed milk. They curdle and appear to ‘cook’ sans heat; without prior knowledge of what is happening and that this is meant to happen, it is quite likely that a cook would throw the whole thing out and start over. Or could Sally have intended to bake a lemon icebox pie which also uses egg yolk and condensed milk, and decided to try out the key lime instead of lemon- in which case she’d know what to expect when milk hits citrus?
Certainly, condensed milk allows cooks to make custard without actually cooking it, a boon to a busy ship cook in a confined galley space—a boon to anyone really who is short of time or equipment. In fact, the spongers probably bought their cans of condensed milk from Curry after importing them to the islands to use on their hook boats, named for the hooking methods used to harvest the sponges. They would mix the milk with pelican eggs snaffled from under the bills of these huge sea birds, which populate the coast of Florida so densely. (I must admit pelican eggs don’t really do it for me, having heard the tale of a Sarasota-based friend whose dog rolled on top of a dead pelican and had to have its fur completely shaved off, so terrible and lingering was the smell.)
Key West is home to historian David L Sloan, a Key Lime and pie expert whose obsession with this regional delicacy led to decades of research, recipe testing and, ultimately, The Key West Key Lime Pie Cookbook, whose pages carry more than 150,000 recipes and pie permutations. He possesses what he claims to be the ‘original recipe’ and cautions against muddling history with authenticity, a common pitfall of the food historian. Founder of a local ghost tour, his research into the island's ghosts led him to the mansion of William Curry and Sally’s recipe, found in the pantry. Much of the debate around the pie is binary: Graham Cracker crust or traditional pastry crust; a topping of cream or lofts of meringue; peaks toasted under the grill or blow torched big hairstyle. Aunt Sally opted for the former and a filling made with the condensed sweetened milk which Sloan claims Curry would have brought back to the island, fully aware as a ship salvager of its usefulness as pantry item for a ships cook. Yet despite finding what could be seen as a recipe for the ur pie, Sloan comes down on the side of the spongers as creators of it and goes as far as claiming that their version probably did not have a cracker crust either. Fighting talk there.
More reading:
Baker Stella Parks (author of Bravetart) threw a spanner in the works when she posited that the first recipe for the pie was created by the Borden condensed milk company in New York City. Actually, Stella isn’t a massive fan of Mexican-grown Key limes, finding them too astringent.
When lime shortages, rising prices, and the impact of Mexican cartel activity caused untold hardship to farmers, their families and community, and the Mexican diaspora here. And yes, this continues.
According to this report, the most abundant fruit in Mexican production is the Persian lime with 49% of total lime exports, followed by (Mexican) Key limes, at 44%.
The brilliant and much-missed Molly O’Neill on the pie.
David Sloan’s ultimate Key lime recipe. Sloan’s book contains a recipe for a ‘Hooker style Key lime pie’ by Extreme Chef Paul Menta, too.
I have often wondered if the pickled limes in ‘Little Women’ and ‘What Katy Did?’ were Key limes. Part of the harvest was placed in wooden barrels, pickled in salt water and shipped to Boston, where they became a popular snack for school children because they were inexpensive. The House Ways and Means Committee of 1909 actually heard arguments in defence of the pickled limes when a fresh fruit tariff was proposed, which would increase their cost. It was felt their value should remain ‘lesser’ because they were, in the main, only eaten by women and children.
More on the subject of pickled limes via Reddit.
Saint Delia’s recipe.
And that time when Meryl Streep’s character in ‘Heartburn’ pushes a Key lime pie into her cheating spouse’s face:
“If I had to do it all over again, I would have made a different pie. The pie I threw at Mark made a terrific mess, but a blueberry pie would have been even better since it would have permanently ruined his new blazer, the one he bought with Thelma.” — Heartburn.
And Nora Ephron’s recipe from chapter 13 of her book:
“The Key lime pie is straightforward to make. First, you line a 9-inch pie plate with a graham cracker crust. Then beat 6 egg yolks. Add 1 cup lime juice (even bottled lime juice will do), two 14-ounce cans of sweetened condensed milk, and 1 tablespoon grated lime rind. Pour into the pie shell and freeze. Remove from freezer and spread with whipped cream. Let sit five minutes before serving.”
A recipe for ‘Old Sour’ marinade from 'Miami Spice’ by Steven Raichlen:
The venerable grandparent of old Floridian sauces is a snappy and piquant mixture of very few ingredients that combine to form a multi-purpose seasoning for raw and cooked foods. Make a batch of it and keep it in a sealed jar. It will keep unrefrigerated for several months and becomes better with age.
1-2 peppers (use Bird, Datil, Scotch Bonnet or other super hot chiles)
1 cup fresh Key lime juice
2 tsp salt (I use a good Maldon, crushed in a pestle and mortar).
Leave chiles whole for a less potent sauce and slice thinly if you want it hotter. Combine all the ingredients in a sterilised jar and cover tightly. Shake well to dissolve the salt. Let the Sour stand for a week at room temperature before using it as a marinade.
Header image: Key lime by Abhishek Jacob