The James Beard Award Winning Cookbook, BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts was published nearly a year ago, but the book is now facing criticism over its assertion that Key Lime Pie was actually created far, far away from the Sunshine State. Stella Parks, the author of BraveTart, found what is believed to be the earliest record of a recipe for this pie by the Borden condensed milk company in 1931 in New York City. It was with lemons, not limes, but it's the same basic pie. The recipe was likely modified to limes in Key West in the 1930s and '40s after a heavy advertising push by Borden.
On Saturday, David Sloan, the author of the 2013 book The Key West Key Lime Pie Cookbook and creator of the Key Lime Festival, pleaded on Facebook for help defending the integrity of Florida's official state pie. "I need Key lime pie help," Sloan wrote. "A new cookbook that is getting a lot of attention claims Key lime pie was first created in a Borden test kitchen on Madison Ave in NY in 1931, not in Key West....Going to compile all of our evidence and make it clear that Key lime pie really is from the Keys."
After digging through archives, Sloan and others found lime pie mentions in Florida before 1931, but for Parks, that's not the same as Key Lime Pie. Lime pies were very popular before the 1930s, as a riff on lemon meringue pies, but these were cooked pies with corn starch, not the no-cook, condensed milk recipes of a Key Lime pie, said Parks.
The Key Lime Pie's origin story comes from a woman named "Aunt Sally" in the 1890s, who had access to condensed milk because she worked for the millionaire ship builder who built the Curry Mansion in Key West. But Parks consulted with Key West historian Tom Hambright, who said that there was no local recipe for Key lime pie earlier than 1949, and that the Aunt Sally story is unverified, reports the Miami Herald.
Parks also argues that the idea that this was a homemade recipe doesn't make much sense.
"Someone figuring out that canned milk can be coagulated with acid is kind of counter intuitive because canned milk itself is a new product," Parks told Gothamist. "It's not like people have been working with canned milk from the 1400s or something. Commercial canned milk was only available from the late 1880s on. It's also the exact kind of recipe that a company with full-time food scientists in a test kitchen would come up with to sell their product.”
Parks insists it was common for companies to concoct recipes for the purposes of selling products. “Historically, these companies have used recipes as a form of advertisement, and that's how so many of our desserts came to exist.”
But Sloan claims to have historical documents that show that William Curry & Sons ship’s chandlery ordered condensed milk earlier than the 1930s. And although Borden published the pie recipe in 1931, it held a recipe contest that same year, and Sloan maintains that someone could have submitted a recipe for Key Lime pie to Borden and simply changed an ingredient to lemons.
"[Parks's] declarations have prompted myself and others to come forward and present facts that prove the author is a condescending hack who has most of her facts wrong,” Sloan told the Key West Citizen Tuesday morning.
In further Key Lime controversy, Parks does not even like key limes. She wrote in Serious Eats "I'm just going to come on out and say it: I hate Key limes. They're tiny, harsh, and abrasive, and a freaking pain to juice." Ironically, Key Limes are no longer grown commercially in Florida. Instead, they all come from Mexico and California, and for Parks, the growing conditions make a big difference in taste. Key limes do grow on trees in backyards in the Keys, but they are not commercially sold. She told Gothamist that she has never tasted a Florida grown key lime.
"I have not had the opportunity to have someone invite me to their backyard to taste key limes," she said. She probably shouldn't hold her breath for an invitation from Sloan.
