Thanksgiving podcasts spend a lot of time debating the merits of pie. Some insist that pie is the only dessert appropriate for this national holiday, and others proscribe apple, pecan and pumpkin as the only pies once should serve.
In fact, the host of the podcast I was listening to this morning declared emphatically that she would never in a million years make lemon chess pie for Thanksgiving. It just isn’t worthy of a place on the Thanksgiving table.
Well, she’s just wrong. I have made a lemon chess pie for Thanksgiving for more years that I can remember. My daughter, now 34, has never known a Thanksgiving without lemon chess pie unless we were visiting friends or family. Even then, I often made one and to bring with us.
I declare lemon chess pie deserves a spot in the panetheon of Thanksgiving pies as much as apple, pecan OR pumpkin, and I have a sound reason for doing so.
Back in the 1980s when I was a master’s student at the University of Alabama, my mentor asked me to mentor an incoming freshman. Her name was Johanna. They knew each other through the Alabama high school press association, and Dr. Huttenstine had worked hard to recruit Johanna for the journalism program at Bama.
Thanksgiving with lemon chess pie
As it turned out, Johanna and I became fast friends. I even visited her home in Huntsville one year the weekend after Thanksgiving, where I encountered her mother’s lemon chess pie. Johanna’s mom, Mrs. Cleary, was an amazing cook. Her broccoli, cheese and rice casserole was what finally won me over to Team Broccoli. I think it was good enough to win over even President George H.W. Bush. But the real knock-out of the weekend was the lemon chess pie.
The filling, tangy and tart with just enough texture from the tablespoon of corn meal and rich with eggs, combined with a light, flake crust was just the right dessert after a big holiday meal.
I got the recipe, and it set in my green plastic recipe box for several years before I had the opportunity to make it. Those were my years just out of school when I still went home for holidays and helped my mother prepare our family’s Thanksgiving dinner, which usually included a cake of some sort, often caramel with the cooked icing (both my parents came from a long line of amazing cake bakers), and a store-bought pumpkin pie. Well, you can imagine which dessert most people went for. Or, after I got married, we might go to my husband’s parents. As immigrants, they tried but didn’t quite get what a Thanksgiving dinner should be.
But as happens, with the passage of time, it became my job to prepare holiday meals, and when I started planning my first menu, my thoughts went to what my parents always liked for Thanksgiving — turkey, stuffing with about two boxes of rubbed sage in it for my father and a fruit salad made with fruit cocktail and whipped topping for my mother. My brother wanted his own can of black olives for his take on a monotoned relish tray and a lemon pie — also one of his very own.
My mother always made lemon icebox pie for him, but when it was my time to make the lemon chess pie, I pulled out Johanna’s mom’s recipe, and the rest is, as they say, history.
With that first Thanksgiving meal, I established the tradition of including loved ones who were either deceased or distant at my table by serving a dish I connected with them — saggy stuffing and sweet potato casserole for my dad, fruit salad for my mom and lemon chess pie for my brother and for Johanna’s mom, who taught me a lot about cooking with love just in that one weekend.
Mrs. Cleary passed earlier this year after a long battle with dementia, but she will still have a spot at my Thanksgiving table.
