A cream pie can be crowned with baked meringue or with whipped cream, and the diner pie case in parts of the South is known for meringue piled several inches high. Meringue is the harder topping to get right. Test kitchens, university food scientists and the egg industry disagree on why it weeps and beads, above all on the temperature of the filling.
The towering meringue pie has a New Orleans pedigree, though accounts differ on who built it. A Texas Farm Bureau feature in 2021 traced it to baked Alaska and credited the Creole chef Louis Evans of the Pontchartrain Hotel’s Caribbean Room with a meringue-capped ice cream pie by the 1950s. The Southern Foodways Alliance credits Annie Laura Squalls, who became the Caribbean Room’s head baker in 1960 and created her “Seven Mile High Pie” there, known colloquially as the “Mile High Pie,” in the words of the alliance’s Gravy podcast “Annie Laura Squalls and Her Mile High Pie.”
From there, the Texas feature says, the style spread to diners that piled meringue onto chocolate, lemon and custard pies. Its guide lists Texas cafes known for meringue, among them Clark’s Outpost in Tioga, where the meringue on chocolate pie can reach a foot. The Southern Foodways Alliance documented the meringue pies at Ed & Kay’s Restaurant in Benton, Arkansas, which closed on 1 March 2014.
Whipped cream has its own lineage and its own shortcut. South Writ Large notes that General Foods introduced Cool Whip in 1966 and recalls a family key lime pie made from it, condensed milk and frozen limeade. In the Texas guide, De Wese’s Tip Top Cafe in San Antonio tops its banana and chocolate icebox pies with inches of creamy white topping sculpted into petals.
Meringue’s two failures have names. America’s Test Kitchen found that liquid pooling between filling and meringue came from undercooking and that beads on the surface came from overcooking. Its fix was to spread the meringue on piping-hot filling and bake in a relatively cool oven. The American Egg Board gives the same reason for the hot filling: its heat cooks the bottom of the meringue and keeps it from weeping. The Egg Board also notes that beads can form under refrigeration. Iowa State University’s food preparation manual agrees that a cold filling causes weeping, but lists baking on a hot filling among the causes of beading, while still recommending it for food safety. Sunset, in its own account, attributes beads to steam from the hot filling.
Bakers who want height without the risk often switch methods. America’s Test Kitchen’s mile-high lemon pie of 2013 uses an Italian meringue, made by beating hot sugar syrup into the whites. University of Wisconsin Extension directs that lemon meringue pies be kept in the refrigerator until they are served.