Transform 3 kitchen staples into pie

In Saving Southern Recipes, Southern Kitchen’s Kate Williams explores the deep heritage of Southern cooking through the lens of passeddown, old family recipes.

If I was to say that you could make a towering, beautiful pie without fiddling with dough, would you believe me? If I was to say that you could make said pie with little more than eggs, cream and sugar, would you scoff ? Suspend your disbelief and hear me out. There is such a pie, and it goes by names that all invoke heavenly bodies to hint at its lighter-thanair texture and (dare I say?) miraculous technique.

Called angel pie, heavenly pie or the admittedly less-seductive upside-down meringue pie, this dessert is simply a meringue base filled with cream and fruit. It is a secret weapon of bakers across the country, but especially in the South, a kitchen-staple pie that looks like a celebration dessert.

Meringues have been around since at least 1691, and cooks have likely been utilizing the aerating magic of whipped egg whites for longer. But it wasn’t until the advent of the mechanical egg beater, around the turn of the 20th century, that meringues really took off in home cooking.

The popularization of pavolovas, named for the ballerina Anna Pavolova, made meringues a full-on trend in the 1920s. My angel berry pie is similar to that dish, yet by using a pie dish for meringue support, it is far more forgiving. You needn’t worry that your meringue is cooked perfectly to a crisp or that you billow its sides in the most beautiful manner. You’ll be covering the whole thing in whipped cream anyway. Do you have a beloved family recipe to share? Send a picture of the recipe card or a typed-out version of the recipe to kate@ southernkitchen.com.