The Recipe for Lemon Meringue Pie

When I was growing up in Malaysia, we always had tasty, spicy, aromatic food. Day in, day out. Garlic. Chilli. Turmeric. And for fruit we always had delicious, flavour-ful mangoes, papayas, rambutans, starfruits. Dripping and juicy with taste. So far so ho-hum.

What we craved was really exotic and exciting foreign food, dishes that were really difficult to achieve in the humid tropical heat. Tastes that involved dairy and foodstuffs that would go off in the rank mugginess. Fruits that were from a cooler climate.

Like lemon meringue pie. Specifically, the home-made lemon meringue pie made by Koo-cheh, my little aunt. She was my father’s youngest aunt and came to live with us with my grandmother when my grandfather died. Kooch was only ten years older than me and she was my favourite aunt. The family called her Mary Poppins as she could always be relied on to keep an eye on us kids.

Making lemon meringue pie in a hot sticky kitchen in the tropics is no joke. It was hugely labour intensive because you had to make each of the three components from scratch. Once a year, for a special occasion, Kooch would spend a whole day in the furnace to make this exquisite dessert. She would make the shortcrust pastry base and bake it blind, with a layer of grease-proffo paper and dried beans to weight down the rising crust. Then she would make the lemon filling, grating the rind of two lemons and boiling it up in their juices, adding sugar and egg yolks and cornflour. She would fill the cooked pastry base with the gluey liquid and let it set.

Finally, she would beat the egg whites with sugar to form a thick, mountainous white fluff that she spooned over the whole lot and the pie would go into the oven to brown the meringue. Later, it would cool on the counter, protected from flies by a half-domed basket and then go into the fridge.

That evening, we would all be abuzz, my parents, grandmother and us kids, saving space for dessert. She would finally bring out the pie and and slice into the soft cloud of meringue, cut down into the rich yellow of the lemon and at last, into the crumbly crustiness of the base. No shop bought lemon meringue pie has ever compared to this home-made tangy, fresh taste blended with the bubbly yet crunchy yet chewy foam of meringue and the bland buttery taste of the baste, all cool and fresh on our palates.

We would regularly beg Kooch to make the pie but she would refuse. When I thnk back on it, she would have been around 17 or 18 and with better things to do than spend hot days cooking for her greedy family. We were lucky she made it for us once a year! But, this reluctance made her a legend in the family at that young age, like a five-star Michelin chef who would only occasionally deign to make her signature dish - and then only when the whim struck her.

Kooch now lives in Canada with her own kids who are around 17 or 18. I have the old Penguin Cookbook of hers, the pages brown and fragile and falling apart. I’ve made lemon meringue pice form there and it always, consistently tastes just as good as if we were tasting it for the first time. This is partly because I’ve only ever made it once every 8 years or more - it is that labour intensive. Or perhaps I’m that lazy…

Still, no matter if I make it or anyone else does, to my family and me, it will always be known as Kooch’s lemon meringue pie.