Don’t ask Wikipedia for a list of pies. The list will be too long to fathom. Still, what are the most common pies in America? Apple certainly. All types of berry and other fruit pies. There’s banana- and coconut-cream pie? In the fall, pumpkin pin. At other times, sweet potato pie. And then there’s lemon-meringue pie.

My mother served a dessert in the 1950s that she called lemon-meringue pie that wasn’t. Instead of a crust, she poured the filling over a single layer of lady fingers and then topped it with the traditional meringue. The lady fingers were a soft American-style, not the hard Italian-style that is common today. The biggest difference between this pie and a true lemon-meringue pie was that the filling was prepared with white wine and not lemon juice. It wasn’t until the 1960s that she would refer to the pie as a “wine dessert” instead of a lemon-meringue pie. As a child, this dessert was not a favorite of mine.

Mom got the recipe—her recipe card is shown in the photo—for the filling from her mother. I do not know if the recipe went all the way back to O’Ma’s finishing-school days in Vienna where she learned to be a “proper” German housewife. Whereas my grandmother would have used a Bavarian white wine, my mother was confined to our local plonk. I remember her keeping a bottle of Italian Swiss Colony Sauterne in the cupboard for cooking. This was a dry wine made, most likely, from Sémillon, Sauvignon blanc, and Muscadelle grapes, not the sweet wine associated with labels like Château d’Yquem.

The crust recipe I used is adapted from one I used earlier for the petits tartes au ganache.