Next to brown sugar pie, this is my favorite chess pie. There are several theories as to how these pies came by their name. Some say that "chess" is a corruption of chest, meaning that these pies were so rich they could be stored in chests at room temperature. Others offer a different explanation: It seems that long ago when a good plantation cook was asked what she was making, she replied, "Jes pie," which over time became "chess." Still others insist that "chess" derives from cheese, as in the English lemon "cheese" (or curd). According to food historian Karen Hess, "cheese" was spelled "chese" in seventeenth-century England. In her historical notes and commentaries for the 1984 facsimile edition of Mary Randolphs Virginia House-wife (1824), Hess writes: "Since the archaic spellings of cheese often had but one 'e' we have the answer to the riddle of the name of that southern favorite Chess Pie.' "
When I lived in New York, I baked dozens of lemon chess pies for the annual Gramercy Park fund-raiser and they sold as fast as I could unpack them. From that experience, I learned to buzz up the filling in the food processor. I even grate the lemon zest by processor. Heres how: Strip the zest from the lemons with a swivel-bladed vegetable peeler, then churn it with the sugar to just the right texture. I next pulse in the lemon juice, then the eggs one by one. Finally, I drizzle the melted butter down the feed tube with the motor running. Thats all there is to it.
If you still make your own pastry, good for you. Many people are too busy to do so today and I occasionally plead guilty myself. Some frozen pie crusts are excellent; find a brand that you like and stick with it.
Note: If you use a frozen pie shell, choose a deep-dish one and recrimp the crust to make a high, fluted edge. This will minimize spillovers, which so often happen with pies. Recrimping is easy: Simply move around the edge of the crust making a zigzag pattern by pinching the dough between the thumb of one hand and the index finger and thumb of the other. Takes less than a minute. Also, before you fill the pie shell, set it—still in its flimsy aluminum tin—inside a standard 9-inch pie pan; this is for added support.
To avoid spillovers, I slide the pie onto a heavy-duty rimmed baking sheet, preheated along with the oven to ensure that the bottom crust will be as crisp as possible.
