Florida’s favorite pie has complicated history

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

It’s not an easy task to track down a definitive recipe for Key lime pie. It’s even more difficult to suss out its history.

The most realistic story is that the first such “pies” were crustless and made from a mixture of lime juice, pelican eggs and sweetened condensed milk. These were said to be assembled by sponge fishermen working in the ocean around the Keys, and were made without needing heat — the acid in the juice reacts with the eggs to thicken the mixture. Another theory is that Key lime pie was an invention of botanist Jack Simons. Yet another is that the first such pie was baked by a woman known as “Aunt Sally,” who was a cook in the mansion of William Curry, a hardware magnate and the first person to bring sweetened condensed milk to the Keys in the mid-19th century.

Aunt Sally could very well have been the first cook to put a lime-and-condensed milk custard inside of a crust, but she probably got the idea for the filling from the fishermen. Its topping is also a matter of debate. While I’d bet on easyto-whip cream as the original topping, you’re still likely to encounter plenty of Floridians who claim that true Key lime pie is always topped with a toasted meringue.

But whatever the topping on the original pie, we know that the filling was certainly made with a very different lime than what is used in most American kitchens today. Most of us can only get regular ol’ Persian limes in our grocery stores. And even if you do find Key limes, they’re likely not even from Florida — they’re most often shipped in from Mexico or California, and, in my experience, tend to be rock hard.

Unfortunately, Persian limes don’t taste exactly like the Key variety; they’re more acidic and make a pie that needs extra sugar from a meringue and a graham cracker crust for balance. If, however, you want to bake a pie that tastes more like the original, simply use a mix of Persian lime and lemon juice. (Sorry, purists.) A touch of lemon will temper and balance the tart lime without needing to resort to dumping even more sugar into the dessert. Feel free to fiddle with the proportions below — Key lime pie is easy enough that you should have no trouble baking through as many as you need in order to land on your perfect ratio.

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.