Hey y’all! It’s that time again…time for our monthly pie making! If you remember, Daenel over at Living Outside the Stacks, and I are hosting a monthly pie along where we provide a seasonal recipe, and some tips and tricks, and then we encourage you to make the pie and then come back next week, grab a cup of coffee, a piece of pie, and then we chat. Last month we made a Maple Orange Walnut Pie, which was just so very yummy. You can see our results here and here. For February we decided to stick to the citrus theme since citrus is in season now. So we chose a Lemon-Lime Chess Pie which is also an Ashley English recipe from her book, A Year of Pies, just like last month.

Chess pies have an unknown origin, but they are definitely a baking staple of the South (having grown up in the south, and considering myself a know-it-all about all things southern, I don’t ever remember having a chess pie before this one). The main ingredients are eggs, sugar, and butter. Some recipes use cornmeal while others use vinegar. This recipe calls for cornmeal which gives it a very interesting texture but I would like to try one with vinegar. From here you can pretty much take the basic recipe and add whatever you’d like: fruit, chocolate, or vanilla.

Some believe the term ‘chess’ came from the southerner’s dialect of ‘chest’ when describing storage options of the pies (the pie has so much sugar in it that you don’t need to refrigerate the pie, but rather can store it in the ‘pie chest’). See this website for some fun information.

The Recipe:
Pie crust (see my post here and here on crust)

For the Filling:
1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 large eggs, beaten
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup lime juice
2 tablespoons grated lemon zest
2 tablespoons grated lime zest

Preheat oven to 350F degrees

Prepare the Crust:
Roll out dough on a lightly floured surface and fit it into a 9-inch pie pan. Trim the crust overhang to 1 inch and crimp the edges decoratively. Place in the refrigerator.

Prepare the Filling:
In a large bowl, combine the sugar, cornmeal, and salt; stir with a fork to fully mix. Add the remaining ingredients and whisk until completely blended.

Assemble the Pie:
Pour the filling into the chilled crust. Set the pie pan on a rimmed baking sheet and bake 40 to 45 minutes, or until the filling is firm around the edges (don’t worry if the center is a bit jiggly–it will firm up once it cools).

Cool completely before serving.

Tips and Tricks:
While this is a very easy pie to make, you need to be prepared with all your ingredients before melting the butter. It takes a LOT of limes and lemons to get 2 tablespoons of each zest. I think I used all the lemons and limes in the picture above. If you look closely at the picture of the unbaked pie above you’ll see the clumps of melted, but cooled, butter in the filling. This happened because I didn’t zest my citrus beforehand so the butter had time to cool. It didn’t affect the outcome or taste of the pie that I could tell, but zest beforehand just the same. And take care when adding hot butter to uncooked eggs. It shouldn’t cook the eggs since you have all that juice and zest and other ingredients, but do stir constantly when adding the butter.

This pie is very light and very citrusy and very yummy. I had fun making it and hope you do too! So go bake those pies and then join us next week to chat!

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