Raise the Red Lantern and Asian Chicken Soup

Da hong deng long gao gao gua (Raise the Red Lantern) (1991)

In modern China, the traditional preference for boys has resulted in 117 boys born for every 100 girls; by one estimate, this means there could be 24 million Chinese men unable to find wives by the end of the decade. Suddenly, marriageable women are a rare commodity. A woman’s fate in modern day terms probably doesn’t compare with 1920s China during the warlord era. On the other hand, some of the themes in Raise the Red Lantern are still true today, even in modern day USA.

The fate of women in my suburban biosphere is living at least a halflife of child care duties; carpooling kids to and from school and activities in their squadrons of minivans, overseeing homework, baking cupcakes for the class party, helping their kids navigate the social waters at school, and various degrees of homemaking. Whatever intrigue went into each woman’s situation, whatever boyfriend-stealing was involved in getting married, whatever fertility issues that were dealt with after that, and whatever home she managed to buy (affordable or not), all of that is back story. Sometimes these minivan moms and I would meet over coffee after dropping the kids off at school at The Blue Cow, a mom-n-pop coffee shop next to the neighborhood pool, in the space left after the WaWa burned down.

We might have all settled and be out of the game as it were, but all of us knew what girls and women were capable of. We’ve heard about the Mean Girls at school, and remember the earlier versions from our own childhoods. We knew of (or were) that nasty girl in high school who used her body to lure guys in her direction…because it worked. You either suffered because you were fat or ugly, or you suffered because you thought you were. We were no strangers to the phenomenon of May/December romances, either from the sidelines or from personal experience, so the beginning of Raise the Red Lantern, where Songlian has resigned herself to a life as a concubine to an older man, is not new. Neither is the framework of dividing the story into seasons; for mothers, everything is already broken down into seasons: the school year, the holidays, and summer vacation. A handful of the moms in my house drinking margaritas and having my ersatz Americanized Chinese food forms a clear-eyed group of women to reflect on the universal truths in Raise the Red Lantern.

SUMMER

The movie opens with Gong Li in long braids impassively looking ahead as she tells her stepmother that after three days of listening to her arguing over what they should do now that her father has died, she has resigned herself to her fate: Let me be a concubine. Isn't that the fate of a woman?

The fate of a woman in all time periods and all places: Selling your body is a means of last resort, youth and beauty are a commodity, and you should be glad a rich man wants you, even if it’s only for one thing. Songlian’s bargain – to trade once on her youth and beauty in exchange for security – reminds me of the story of a man who offered a woman one million dollars to sleep with him, and when she agreed, then offered her ten dollars instead. What do you think I am? The woman asked. We’ve established what you are, the man said. Now we’re just negotiating on price. Becoming a concubine of a rich man is not unlike the world’s oldest profession, here gussied up with traditional Chinese garb in embroidered satin – the cheongsam was created in the 1920s in Shanghai and was made fashionable by socialites and upper class women. Although Songlian walks the entire way from her home to the new compound in her schoolgirl skirt and white shirt, she will be transformed after her arrival into an elegant upper class woman in traditional dress. Once that internal price of selling out has been exacted, of course, the various hidden prices of the deal will begin to reveal themselves.

Master Chen, the husband and landowner in the film, is a nameless, faceless man who must be somewhere in his 50s, since First Mistress is older and they have a grown son (Feipu, or Young Master). Although he is central to every decision and calls all the shots, all the intrigue is between the wives, concubines, and maids in their rivalry to please the father figure, as though their lives depend on it. There can only be one favorite.

Director Zhang Yimou shoots the household courtyard from above, a rabbit warren where you can watch to see which hole the husband will choose to patronize that evening. His choice is witnessed by all, and heralds much fanfare and the raising of the red lanterns, a ceremony of lifting, hooking, and lighting lanterns outside the doors of the chosen mistress. The lucky girl also receives a foot massage by a toothless crone, Aunt Cao, and the final decision on the following day’s menu for the household. Songlian doesn’t eat meat, so when she has the lanterns, she asks for spinach, bean curd and sprouts, which everyone in the household must eat. When the Third Mistress has the lanterns, she will have to eat pork steamed in lotus leaves, or nothing.

It takes about forty minutes for the film to reveal its gruesome underbelly, a mysterious locked room on the roof: Bluebeard’s closet storing the bones of those who fell out of favor. Don’t worry about it, Songlian is advised. You’re new here, you’ll get used to it.

From Songlian’s point of view, it is like arriving at the Playboy Mansion with the advantage of novelty and youth, surrounded by people angling for good, better, or best. There are many close up shots of Gong Li’s perfect face, stoic in the beginning, gazing at herself in the mirror with a red lantern in her hand after her first night with the Master, silent tears rolling down her face. She has accepted her fate as a woman: her world has dwindled to getting along with others and serving the master, but it is clear from her haughty demeanor that she feels she deserves better.

The First Mistress, Yuru, has already borne a son for Master Chen (Feipu). Her days of youth and beauty have long since passed. She is beyond the insult, has done her duty and has retired, with a gaggle of cackling hens at her table that she can neither bond with nor control. Such sins, she mutters to herself after meeting the newest Mistress to the house. What do I matter? she asks. I’m just an old woman.

The Second Mistress, Zhuoyan, is initially friendly to Songlian, and is self-deprecating about her status in the house: How useless…I only have a daughter. Songlian will find out the truth of Third Mistress’s description of Zhuoyan as having the face of the Buddha but the heart of a scorpion and she learns of their rivalry during their pregnancies, vying to give birth first, the attempts to poison Third Mistress to get her, or at least her heir, out of the way, and using injections to speed up her delivery…to no avail, since, as Third Mistress says, She only had a cheap little girl born three hours after my son. She is the Mistress I can most easily see in today’s terms: overemphasizing her role by overcompensating; pureeing her own baby food, homeschooling, scrapbooking.

The Third Mistress, Meishan, a former opera singer, is the one unseated by Songlian as the  youngest and most favored of the master. Third Mistress still approaches her world the way a professional entertainer would: playing to her strength as a voice to ring from the rafters of the compound. It’s all playacting, she tells Songlian. You’re new here and the master isn’t tired of you yet. But if you don’t give him a son, you’re in for hard times. Whether student or opera singer, their fates are the same. Meishan isn’t too proud to trade luxury for sex – it’s a calculated decision, a way of continuing to manage her career.

Yan’er, Songlian’s maid, is so far down on the social ladder that Songlian’s life looks worth envying. She is the groupie, the hanger-on to the fringes of a world she can never hope to enter. Songlian has what she doesn’t want, what her maid Yan’er wants and can’t ever have. Yan’er exists on the edges, spying, sneaking around, and hiding in her room with her stash of red lanterns, closing her eyes and pretending, feet propped up on boxes, when the sound of the clacking foot massage of the day wafts across the courtyard. She hates Songlian for her easy entrance into the world she admires from afar, and keeps a voodoo doll of her nemesis to stab with pins.

Only the men have access to art and literature. Feipu, the Young Master, is the face of the next generation bearing witness to his father’s life, and to what his future will likely look like. There is also a glimpse of the even younger Young Master, Meishan’s son, reciting poetry to his father, clearly continuing the tradition of the men of the family. Songlian finds Feipu playing the flute on the roof, a young man her own age who shares her own interests. Later, he will witnesses her drunken rant when things spiral out of control.

Although Songlian only spent six months at university before having to leave, it’s enough to set her apart. Those six months will make her “the educated one” in the pecking order of the house. You’re better, Second Mistress will tell her, You went to university.

The Master answers to no one. Songlian is mad that he appears to be boinking her maid? The Master simply goes to the Third Mistress instead.

Going through her old suitcase, Songlian puts aside her modern schoolgirl blouse from her life before, and takes out a flute wrapped in tapestry with tassels, the only thing she has from her father. She is interrupted by Yan’er, and scrambles to hide the flute as if the suitcase contained something contrabnad, and blames Yan’er later when her flute goes missing. Only men play the flute, Yan’er says to her. Songlian raids Yan’er’s room and finds the red lanterns, and the voodoo doll. Since Yan’er is illiterate, Songlian figures out that it is Second Mistress manipulating behind the scenes. In spite of all the drama, it turns out that the Master is to blame for the missing flute: he tells Songlian he took the flute because he was afraid it would distract her, and had it burned in case it had been a gift from a boy at university.

The Master disappears for periods of time (Out making money? Seeing friends? Drinking in bars? Womanizing?) It is never explained, as he does not have to explain himself to anyone. However, when he returns, he expects each of the mistresses to be waiting docilely in her room (Why can’t she stay in her own house?), in case he chooses her if and when he returns home. When the Master returns one evening and learns that Songlian and Meishan are playing mahjongg, he goes to Second Mistress to spite them.

Mahjongg with Meishan is as rebellious as it gets. They are joined by Dr. Gao and his friend Mr. Wang. Songlian describes her life to them that she is one of the master’s robes that he can wear or take off.  Dr. Gao mentions Meishan’s former career and puts on opera music either as a tribute to her real self or to rub it in, it isn’t clear. Under the table, Dr. Gao and Meishan play footsie while on the walls behind them loom giant Chinese masks scowling over the table.

AUTUMN

By autumn, the landscape has changed to rain among the lanterns outside Songlian’s house. She attempts to confront the master. This place must be haunted, she says: That room on the roof. He is dismissive: Two people were hanged there, that’s all. Two women from the past generations who had illicit affairs. They argue about whether Yan’er is spying on them, and he goes off in a fit of pique to Second Mistress, who gloats later to Songlian that the Master told her she would look younger with shorter hair. It’s not clear whether Songlian cuts her ear on purpose or not while helping her achieve her shorter hairstyle, but Second Mistress plays up the injury to the Master, who caves into her sob story: Your sisters shouldn’t be like this – all right, I’ll stay with you a few nights.

Yan’er taunts Songlian about her ability to entice the master. Wait and see what I can do, Songlian says. Her plan is to fake a pregnancy, with the hope that it will happen naturally, having the master with her every night: pregnancy (real or fake) gives you automatic lanterns for the duration of the pregnancy.

WINTER

If you could stay pregnant all the time and have nothing but sons, your life would be as good as it gets in this house. While Songlian is treated as the precious vessel, Third Mistress gets a dig in at Second Mistress that Songlian might have a son, and thus outrank her, while First Mistress  looks on tiredly, wishing they would shut up. Second Mistress’s talent at massage will be used against her when Songlian requests a massage for her pregnant self.  Of course Master told her, Third Mistress says: Show us how well you take care of the master. Second Mistress goes through with the massage, but gets back at Songlian by feigning concern over her condition and calling Dr. Gao to examine her, blowing the whole scam out of the water. The most interesting part of that scene is Dr. Gao on his way to speak to the master, and seeing Meishan on the way. She makes reference to some prescription pills he has given her, and asks what’s going on. I’ll tell you later, Gao says.

Done in by red menstrual blood on her white pants, Songlian faces the Master’s wrath: How dare you! He will extinguish her life by having all of her lanterns covered with black shrouds. Even the lanterns inside her room are covered. Her days of enticement with her sexual novelty and youth are abruptly ended. She gets even by dragging Yan’er out into the snow, and having her kneel in front of the red lanterns on the white snow, until they have burned to the ground. 

She talks to Meishan on the roof later, both standing regally with their hands hidden in muffs. Don’t be so unhappy, Meishan tells her to just go on living despite the circumstances. On her twentieth birthday, Songlian forces Aunt Cao to get her some wine to celebrate and gets drunk. Aunt Cao tells her that Yan’er couldn’t blame her for her death, since it was her destiny. In a drunken rant, she reveals Meishan’s secret. Why did you tell? Aunt Cao asks Songlian. Because you hate the doctor?

Meishan pays the ultimate sacrifice for her transgressions (nothing happens, at least on-screen, to Dr. Gao). She is dragged from her room to be hanged. Songlian watches, hidden from view, to see what happens: the servants kill the woman, lock  the door, and run. Then, there is silence on the roofs, as Meishan’s beautiful voice has been permanently stilled.

When the Master returns, he acts indignant and and downplays the tragedy: What did you see? You’ve gone mad. As if to prove his point, Songlian slips over to Third Mistress’s house and lights her lanterns, frightening the servants that her ghost is haunting her old living quarters. Meishan’s apartment, backlit with lanterns, looks like a jack o’lantern or one of those Chinese masks that used to oversee the mahjongg games. The shot ends with Songlian in room full of lanterns, blowing out a match, playing opera on a phonograph. She sits, listening as if awaiting the next stage of her fate as a woman.

There is no SPRING.

SUMMER, ONE YEAR LATER

The next summer opens with firecrackers heralding the Fifth Mistress’s wedding and the sounds of the foot massage clacking and the Fourth Mistress has lost her mind, wandering around the grounds in old schoolgirl clothes among the red lanterns. The final image is of the one who cracked under the pressure, never to be the same again.

Asian Chicken Soup

Every mom has a chicken soup fallback, even if it’s a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle. My mom’s post-Thanksgiving turkey soup was a pot full of bones with water poured over top, with some carrots and celery thrown in to boil to death with the bones. The final color was a dishwater yellow-gray, with burbles of oil floating on the surface. For years, the gold standard of chicken soup came in a red Campbell’s can. It always tasted the same, with a salty background and indestructible noodles that kept their shape despite months soaking in the can or overheating on the stove. A sick day home from school always meant chicken noodle soup with saltines, ginger ale, and Tiger Beat magazine. For years, I didn’t see the point of homemade chicken soup – why bother with the dishwater version, when the perfect version already came in a can? Moms with better culinary skills have been making versions of chicken soup for years – my friend Dafna once brought me a large Ziploc bag full of authentic Jewish Penicillin from her mother’s kitchen, a homemade broth lapping around and flavoring one large Matzo ball.

Some chefs take this tack of anything goes, swearing on good results by approaching your soup like slopping pigs – use up what you have! Throw all your garbage in the pot! The truth is, the best soup comes from starting all the way from scratch, with the best ingredients you can get, and a minimal amount of refrigerator cleaning-out. The base of my Asian Chicken soup starts with sautéing two garlic cloves, a 2” piece of ginger minced down, and a bunch of scallions sliced into 2 tablespoons of canola oil. If you don’t have scallions, regular onions will do. You have to have the garlic and the ginger. From there, you can add carrots and celery and sauté until everything is wilted and soft. If you know you  are going to make this soup and are standing in the aisle at Trader Joe’s, you can buy a container of mirepoix – onions, carrots and celery all minced perfectly for soup and parfaited into a container for easy use, no slicing or dicing. To all this, add three cups of chicken broth, 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, 1 tablespoon of sherry, a pinch of sugar, one tablespoon of sesame oil, and a squirt of Sriracha to taste. The sauces will add a brown tinge and a meaty background note to the soup. Add half a rotisserie chicken, shredded and chopped into bite-sized pieces, and a cup of sliced snow pea pods, if you have them on hand. Salt and pepper to taste. You can make this entire soup vegetarian by leaving out the meat and using vegetable stock.

You can make your own chicken stock if you feel compelled to keep up with the Joneses, or the Martha Stewarts in your neighborhood. You boil the carcass of a roasted chicken with carrots, celery and onion in a Dutch oven until the chicken completely falls apart (keep a large Ziploc bag by the stove and from time to time, use tongs to pick out bones that have fallen away). Finally, strain the chicken water into a large bowl and refrigerate overnight. In the morning, skim off the fat and voila – chicken stock. It will have a gelatinous, jiggly quality to it that tells you it’s the good stuff.

Or, you can just buy the stock in a carton and get over it.

Here is the best part: about five minutes before you want to eat it, add three or four frozen gyoza dumplings per serving to the hot soup, little puckered purses of savory filled noodles. Any longer and the dumplings will disintegrate into its base elements. How does Campbell’s do their thing with those noodles? It’s probably like making sausage…we don’t really want to know. Serve the soup with saltine crackers. Sometimes it’s really all about the sameness of the crackers, even if the soup changes slightly each time.

The Shawshank Redemption and Key Lime Pie

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

I watch a lot of movies; as I told one of my classes one day, I probably watch a movie every day (one student actually asked me if it was the same movie…), but it’s true – I usually find time to watch at least one movie every day, and I still like to go see movies when they come out in actual movie theaters. Regardless, I am always caught out by something missing in my inner catalog -- a film student will mention a film and be surprised to hear that I haven’t seen it, usually something I know about but haven’t gotten around to seeing. There just aren’t enough hours in a day to ever catch up, especially since they keep making new movies every day.

Still, it’s a great moment when you find out that someone you know hasn’t seen one of your favorite films, especially when you know them well enough to know that they will love the film as much as you do. The next best thing is watching that movie with them in your sweats, hair in ponytails, eating great snacks. My sister Bonnie and I made a game attempt at recreating the cheese fries we love at Longhorn Steakhouse – a favorite stop after many a Christmas-shopping-ToysRUs/Target/PierOne extravaganza – but facing up to all the grease and cheese involved when you make them yourself is a bit of a thrill kill. However, Key lime pie, a family obsession of sorts, is never wrong. And the balance of the sweet and the sour is the perfect background to go with The Shawshank Redemption.

The underlying secret to Shawshank’s charm is that it’s narrated by one of the characters, and it sounds like Stephen King’s voice, or the way I imagine he would tell his own story, with a flutter of magic and whimsy under the surface of what is a very hard morality tale. In his books, King’s voice is a folksy, beer-on-the-porch guy who has lived to tell his tale. The film’s score takes that bluesy sensibility to the next level with musical highs and lows and songs that feel familiar even if on their listen, like the Ink Spots’ “If I Didn’t Care.” By the time you get to the last song, it feels like you’ve been there before, if only because the Shawshank theme has been used in commercials to sell inspirational, dramatic, or romantic films.

The narrator is Morgan Freeman, the voice of God (Bruce Almighty) and a believable stand-in for Stephen King’s storyteller, told in flashbacks in voiceover, but it’s not Books on Tape – there is some show, some tell. The original story’s narrator had red hair and people called him Red: “Maybe it's 'cause I'm Irish” – Freeman plays this line for ironic laughs when it comes up in the film. The beginning, middle and end are marked in the film with three separate parole hearings for Red, a construct made for movies where the audience is looking for cues as to where they are in the story.

Andy Dufresne is played by Tim Robbins, and he is so right in the part that it is hard to imagine the other actors they wanted instead: Tom Hanks, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage, Johnny Depp, Charlie Sheen, all actors with plenty of attitude. Robbins plays the enigmatic Andy with a low-key style, an anti-attitude, that works for the part.

As a kid, I found cynical, noir-ish prison movies on the late-night black and white B movies on TV – a young girl caught up in petty theft goes to prison scared and vulnerable, comes out after years of incarcerated one tough cookie – any hope you have for her soul and survival are whittled away to nothing by the time she gets out. I also liked this type of story in B magazines – one of them, in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, had a prisoner sawing away at the bars of his cell and replacing them as he went with fake cement made from the only bread and water he was given to live on. Guy breaks out and makes a swim for it – he was in Alcatraz or some place like it – and drowns, just hours before his pardon comes in at the prison. Whatever the outcome of the prison break or release, it always comes too late for something.

Shawshank turns out to be a tunneling-out story, which evokes the most primal of fears: crawling through the worst kind of (literal) shit imaginable, with the fear of rats and being buried alive, and an uncertainty of the final outcome. Red describes Andy's dream of escape and freedom as a "shitty pipe dream" which literally comes to pass. And without certainty of success either; as Red tells the story, Andy makes his escape, not knowing what would be at the end of the pipe – a heavy-gauge mesh screen would have been an unfunny joke. But when he emerges into the rain and turns his face up for absolution and baptism back into the free world, it’s a classic Stephen King moment, even though these details from the film aren’t in the novella.

The movie wanders away from the original story in a couple of places. A reader will accept an almost nonstop interior dialogue, tedious in film where you are always waiting for the next thing to happen. In a story, you can include a variety of minor characters who may or may not play a major role somewhere in the plot, and have them just dribble away into the book’s spine as background color. In a movie, particularly one where you introduce a cast of characters that you want your audience to identify and sympathize with – if only to set up gags and jokes for comic relief – the audience wants to know what happens to each of them by the end of the film, and to save the best revenge for the warden (the deliciously evil Bob Gunton). Shawshank’s frame story has shades of “The Body” (or if you saw the film, Stand By Me) that reveal Stephen King’s hand behind the curtain. Both stories are told in flashback, and both involve a narrator talking about a group of guys who face death and crime in a singular time and place, everyone goes their separate, mostly-tragic ways, and nobody walks away unchanged. In Shawshank, not everyone’s story is completed in the novella; the film completes more story arcs for the secondary characters.

Some characters from the film exit the story differently than the novella. The movie gives us a young guy that everybody likes, and an old guy that everybody likes, both characters extended dramatically in the film from how they appear in print. The young guy, Tommy (Gil Bellows from “Criminal Minds” and “Ally McBeal” – who got the part originally intended for Brad Pitt), who gets his GED thanks to Andy’s tutoring and provides shocking information about the crime Andy was framed for, is taken out of play by merely shipping him off to another prison. Expanding the dramatic importance of his character – by having the guy delivering food into the slot where Andy is in solitary confinement tell him, “The kid passed. C+.” gives the audience more of a stake in the character, as well as showing the other inmates’ solidarity with Andy. This doesn’t happen in the book. And although the evil warden comes to a bad end in the novella, it is not the visceral send off that the film builds up to and finally delivers.

Brooks, the old guy that everybody likes in the film (James Whitmore) is drawn with a more detailed pen in the movie as well. Brooks’ demise is shown visually in the film, with “Brooks Was Here” dug into the rafter where he hangs himself, where the book has him exit stage left, a sad end to a sad man, but no real details. Part of the effectiveness of “Brooks Was Here” scratched into the wood is Morgan Freeman’s Red following his footsteps to the same halfway house later, and scrawling “So Was Red” – but taking a different road. Again, not in the book….but works in the film.

Oftentimes, moviegoers have different expectations than readers, and film gives you an opportunity to increase the tension by showing something visually. My favorite scene, where Andy plays Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” – on a 33LP at that – and broadcasts it across the prison – appears nowhere in King’s written version, but it’s a powerful moment in the film, a crucial F-you moment, from a guy who has no power to flip anyone the proverbial bird. Three years after Shawshank, Roberto Begnini would use a similar plot device in Life is Beautiful when Guido plays an LP of the opera he attended with his wife before the war, turning the phonograph horn so that the sound travels to the part of the camp where she will hear it and know he is still alive and there is still hope. It works, because the idea of the soundtrack of your life swelling up in snippets is how we experience life. The metaphor of using it to communicate with others is clever and universal.

In the original story, there are a series of posters that cover the hole Andy is digging – we see Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch on the wall of Andy’s cell in the film – but the final poster in the novella is Linda Ronstadt, not Raquel.

After a disappointing box office, Shawshank went on to be the most rented movie of 1995. The best things in life sometimes end up being made of stuff that seems completely prepackaged, until you recognize the value underneath its deceptive simplicity.

Key Lime Pie

There have been too m any bummer Key lime pie moments to count, where the restaurant server brings out an obvious imposter – a gelatin-based custard dyed green to jack up your expectations about how “lime” it was going to be, with the final insult – a twist from a regular (not a Key) lime, on the top.

A good Key lime pie should be a thick, dishwater dirty beige custard, dense and able to hold a gooey point when dropped off the pie server -- not whipped into an airy fluff. Extra points are given for graham cracker -- as opposed to vanilla wafer -- crust, and points are taken off for the presence of a fake-out green lime wedge garnish).

On a trip through Florida in 2003, I made it my mission to track down the ultimate Key Lime Pie. The award eventually went to Papa Joe’s Restaurant and Marina on Islamorada.  Second prize went to Mangrove Mama's on Sugarloaf Key, where the crust was a coarse crumble of what tasted like cinnamon graham crackers, which almost compensated for the (real, regular) lime garnish. After snarfing my way through the Key lime pies at the Islamorada Fish Company and The Key Lime Pie Factory in Islamorada, a divey-looking exterior in a strip mall with the best Key lime pie to be had at a storefront, which also sold assorted Key Krap -- candles, lotion, soaps, and after a forgettable breaded-and-deep-fried Key lime pie at yet another roadside dive, I finally discovered that every supermarket in south Florida stocked a freezer case full of Key lime pies to be hoarded and smuggled to the Northern states (if they lasted that long). Further, that the elements of a really excellent Key lime pie came from processed ingredients.

I mailed myself a postcard from Key West with a recipe for Key Lime Pie on the front of it, just to remind myself how easy they were to make (and how delicious things made from processed food items could actually be). Here’s what should go into a Key Lime Pie: one 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk, 4 egg yolks, 1 graham cracker crumb pie crust, 1/2 cup key lime juice, and whipped cream.

The sweetened condensed milk: You can make sweetened condensed milk from scratch if you want to. There are recipes for this online, involving milk and sugar, and a little bit of butter, boiled down to a syrupy sauce. On the other hand, the exact amount you need for a Key Lime Pie comes premeasured in convenient cans that you can keep in your pantry until you get the urge to make a pie. One can per pie, unless you double the recipe and use the larger pie crust, and fill up a few mini crusts to go with it.

The eggs: If you double this recipe, you are left with the prospect of what to do with the eight – count ‘em, eight – egg whites that you did not use for this recipe. You can put them in the refrigerator and slip them into regular eggs for breakfast for the rest of the week, like Andy disposing of cement dust hidden in his clothes into the prison yard. The good news is, unlike a recipe that requires egg whites where it is crucial not to get any yellow in the white, if your recipe calls for egg yolks, it is OK if some white gets into the yellow.

The crust: You can make your own graham cracker crust yourself, whirling some graham crackers to a dust and following the rest of the routine, but why bother when the elves in Keebler’s trees have already made you a crust? They even have a Supersize version and also a package of six mini-graham cracker crusts.

The limes: You can buy your own Key limes (tiny little marbles of limeness) and squeeze the juice yourself. You can find them fresh in Asian supermarkets, and you can even buy them online at amazon.com – but there is no need. Go to your own supermarket, and look for Nellie & Joe's Famous Key West Lime Juice from Concentrate. If it’s not next to the RealLemon with the juices, look in the aisle where they have tonic water and mixers – it may be sitting next to the Mojito mix in that aisle.

The whipped cream: You can buy your own whipping cream and whip it yourself with as little or as much sugar as you like, or you could just buy the aerosol can and be done with it. Or you can leave the cream off altogether, but I think the pie looks more finished with a frill of whipped cream ringing the edge.

After baking and cooling, you can freeze the pie for later. Even after you can’t stand it any more and start to dig into it, you can still put the remains back into the freezer for optimum shelf life (if there is any left).

Preheat your oven to 350F. Whisk together condensed milk and yolks in a bowl until combined well. Add juice and whisk until combined well (mixture will thicken slightly). Pour filling into crust and bake in middle of oven 15 minutes. Cool pie completely on rack (filling will set as it cools), then chill, covered, at least 8 hours. Top with whipped cream. Try not to eat the whole thing in one sitting.

Can be baked with a file inside, if you are so inclined J