Sour Orange Pie, Before the Key Lime

Long before Key lime pie became the official taste of Florida, there was sour orange pie. It is the older dessert, and for a lot of Florida families it was the first.

The fruit came over with the Spanish. Sour oranges, the same bitter Seville oranges that England turns into marmalade, were planted at St. Augustine in the 1500s, among the first oranges of any kind to reach North America. For the first few hundred years that Europe grew oranges at all, the Seville was the only one it had. In Florida the tree took to the climate and then took off on its own, escaping the dooryards and going feral in hammocks and along fence lines across the state. Generations of Floridians grew up with a sour orange tree somewhere within reach, too tart to eat off the branch but right at home in the kitchen.

Cooks used the juice the way others used lemon or lime, to brighten fish and meat and to make a pie. The earliest versions were a citrus curd, egg yolks and sugar and a little cornstarch cooked down with plenty of fresh sour orange juice, because this was Florida before refrigeration and before canned milk. When sweetened condensed milk became a pantry staple, the pie changed to suit it. Yolks, condensed milk, and sour orange juice whisked together set into a custard with barely any cooking at all, the same trick that made Key lime pie famous a little later down the chain of islands.

It never really left, but it faded. Sweet oranges became the cash crop and the sour ones were treated as weeds or rootstock, while the Key lime took the fame and the tourist menus. Sour orange pie stayed a homemade thing, the kind of recipe written on a card and kept in a family rather than printed in a guidebook. It is worth bringing back. Made right it is sharper and more floral than a Key lime pie, and it tastes like the Florida that grew in backyards rather than the one sold on postcards.

The Recipe

This is the modern condensed milk version, the one most Florida kitchens settle on. It makes one nine inch pie.

• 1 prepared graham cracker crust, 9 inch
• 4 large egg yolks
• 1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk
• 1/2 cup fresh sour orange juice, from about 4 to 5 sour oranges
• 1 teaspoon grated sour orange zest, optional
• Whipped cream, to serve

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Whisk the egg yolks on their own for a minute, until they thicken slightly and lighten in color.
3. Whisk in the condensed milk until smooth.
4. Add the sour orange juice and the zest and whisk again. The filling will thicken on its own as the acid meets the milk.
5. Pour into the graham crust and bake 15 to 17 minutes, until the center is just set and no longer wet to the touch.
6. Cool to room temperature, then chill at least 3 hours, and overnight if you can.
7. Top with whipped cream and serve cold.

If you cannot find sour oranges, you can approximate the balance with about two parts fresh orange juice to one part lime juice. A real sour orange tree, if you know someone with one in the yard, is the whole point.