Lemon Ice Box Pie
By PATRICIA KEARNEY
When Aunt Jimmy visited us, we knew at least one
morning would be devoted to making truly delicious lemon ice box pie.
Aunt Jimmy was not a blood-related aunt, nor was her given name Jimmy.
Her name was Edie Cantrell, and she was married to Zachary Cantrell,
whom we called Uncle Peco. When I looked back on them with my adult
perspective, I saw Peco and Jimmy were most likely surrogate parents for
my mother.
Mom’s mother died when Mom was 2, her dad didn’t know what to do with a
little girl, so my mother grew up fending for herself. Mom roomed with
the Cantrells at some point during her college years, and she was the
daughter they never had. Their only child, Jackson, died in the 1940s.
Maybe we should have called them some version of “Grandma” and
“Grandpa,” but Aunt Jimmy and Uncle Peco it was.
Jimmy and Peco ran Peco’s Bar in Warren, Michigan. They lived in a small
(and I do mean SMALL) house set back on the lot, so in my child’s mind
the front yard was huge.
After Peco and Jimmy retired, they took a trip to Acapulco, which
sounded exotic and farther away than any place I could ever imagine.
Then they went to live in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where Peco grew up. Peco
died in 1961, and it was in the years after his death, when I was a
teenager, that Jimmy would come to Detroit in the summer for a visit and
we would make pies.
Jimmy was quite a character. Her hair was dyed
auburn. She wore red lipstick. She smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. She was
the first person I ever saw use Listerine, which back then was packaged
in a brown wrapper with black letters and lots of small print, maybe to
make it seem like serious, nearly medicinal, stuff.
She peppered all her food until there was a thin coating of black on
everything. She had a dog, Pal, a gentle creature. Pal never ate a speck
of dog food in his life. I remember frying up liver or chicken gizzards
for him when they would visit.
Jimmy had a muumuu that I always imagined she got in Acapulco, and she
wore it in the mornings before getting dressed for the day. It wasn’t a
gaudy floral print like you would figure a muumuu to be. It had a
batik-like pattern with slivers of brick red, gold and forest green in
it. I thought it was beautiful.
To get Jimmy to Detroit, Mom would take a Greyhound
bus from Detroit to Jonesboro, they would drive back in Jimmy’s car,
then Mom would drive her back to Arkansas and take the Greyhound back
home.
Jimmy’s car was retrofitted with an air conditioner that was attached
under the middle of the dashboard. Somehow the six in our family plus
Jimmy would fit in the car when we would go out to dinner, which meant
some kid was right in front of the AC with chilly legs. Aunt Jimmy would
smoke one or two of those Pall Malls in the car and our eyes would burn.
On the mornings when we made pies, we would pull out
the table in the kitchen that folded into the wall. Our family rarely
used it because you couldn’t open the side door of the house when the
table was out. We made the pies from scratch, starting with graham
crackers—not the crumbs you can buy in a box, and certainly not a
pre-made graham cracker crust.
We arranged the graham crackers between wax paper folded in half and
crushed them with a rolling pin until they were the right crumbly
texture. We mixed the crumbs with butter and sugar, then pressed the
mixture with a spoon along the bottom and sides of the pie plates to
form the crust.
We grated real lemons to get some zest, then cut them in half to press
them with the juicer. The juicer stood about nine inches high, maybe
taller, and with the half lemon placed over the juice cup, you used the
handle on the side to bring the top down over the lemon.
The recipe for the filling for one pie was a can of Eagle Brand
Sweetened Condensed Milk, two egg yolks and a half cup of lemon juice,
along with a teaspoon or so of lemon zest. Aunt Jimmy always added the
lemon juice last and would say, “The lemon cooks the eggs.”
She taught us to beat the egg whites into meringue until it formed stiff
peaks, gradually adding the confectioner’s sugar and a quarter teaspoon
of cream of tartar. I never understood how a quantity as small as a
quarter teaspoon could matter that much in any recipe. She taught us to
spread the meringue to the edge of the crust so it wouldn’t shrink while
baking.
We would start around 9 in the morning, and by noon would pull two pies
with lightly browned meringue peaks out of the oven. We would have them
for dessert that night, and everyone would love them.
We always did one other thing when Jimmy visited. We
visited the cemetery. Even though Peco was from Arkansas, when he died
she had him buried at a cemetery in the Detroit area—after all, that was
where Jackson was. Jimmy would sit on top of Peco’s grave and weep and
beat the ground with her fists and cry, “Why did you leave me?”
After about a half hour, her catharsis was complete and she gathered
herself up and we went home. I never saw her cry other than over Peco’s
grave, and when Pal died.
When she died, in 1967, she was buried alongside Peco and Jackson. Mom
inherited her modest estate.
Over the years whenever I made the pie, I could hear my Aunt Jimmy’s
voice saying, “The lemon cooks the eggs” and see her in my mind’s eye as
she gently stirred the Eagle Brand, juice, rind and eggs together. Maybe
she thought she was just making pies on a summer morning, but she was
really creating a memory.
And that is the story of the truly delicious Lemon Ice Box Pie.
Patricia Kearney grew up in Detroit, Michigan,
and moved to Virginia in 1973. The pie tradition her aunt started is
being passed to the next generation.
