Atlantic Beach pie
Atlantic Beach pie is a type of lemon curd pie which uses a saltine crust and whipped cream topping sprinkled with salt.
Development
The recipe was developed by Bill Smith, then chef at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, restaurant Crook's Corner, who had as a child in the 1950s and 1960s vacationed in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, where local lore held that only citrus-based desserts could be safely eaten after eating seafood. When asked to develop a dessert for a Southern Foodways Alliance event in 2011, he developed a pie inspired by the lemon meringue pies typically offered in area seafood restaurants. Unlike lemon meringue pies, which typically use a shortcrust pastry base and are topped with meringue, Smith's recipe calls for a saltine cracker crust and a whipped cream topping and is garnished with finishing salt.Food writer,, helped bring Bill Smith’s iconic Atlantic Beach Pie into the national spotlight when she featured it on NPR’s Found Recipes series. Her enthusiastic retelling of the pie's coastal North Carolina roots introduced a new wave of home cooks to this Southern dessert.