Meet Atlantic Beach Pie: The Salty-Sweet Treat Where Saltine Crackers Are The Star

The United States is a sprawling country with wide-ranging foodways that, even in this modern age, can remain anchored to their birthplace. For example, North Carolina has a unique barbecue centered on pork that's typically cooked with a vinegary sauce. It also has Calabash seafood, lightly battered fish, shrimp, oysters, and clams from the coast. Relatedly, there's a lemon pie with an unusual crust that's historically served after a seafood dinner in the same region as Calabash seafood. The traditional version is a lemon meringue pie with a saltine cracker crust, giving it a distinctive saltiness that perfectly balances the sour and sweet filling.

These days, it tends to go by the name Atlantic Beach Pie, an appellation given to this unique dessert by Bill Smith when he was the chef at Crook's Corner, a seafood restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (he's since retired and the restaurant closed in 2021). He adapted his version from the type of lemon pie he recalled eating as a child in the 1950s along the North Carolina coast. He kept the unique crust, but replaced the traditional meringue with whipped cream. He named his version after a beach near where he grew up in New Bern, North Carolina.

Atlantic Beach Pie's filling is a simple mix of lemon or lime juice (or a mixture of the two), sweetened condensed milk, and egg yolks, making it not that much different from similar desserts, such as Key lime pie. But the crust is where these sweet treats diverge. The saltine soda cracker crust is thick and crispy with a saltiness that sets it apart from a graham cracker or a cookie crust. There are versions of this North Carolina dessert that instead call for Ritz crackers, but either way, savory crackers bring a salty difference to the pie.

Saltine cracker pie crusts emerged in the mid-20th century as an easier alternative to traditional pie crusts. At its simplest, it's just saltines, butter, and sugar. We found a recipe for a somewhat similar lemon pie with saltine crust from The St. Louis Argus newspaper dating to the mid-1950s, but the North Carolina version is by far the best known. Thanks to national exposure from NPR and other outlets, it's Bill Smith's Atlantic Beach Pie with the whipped cream top that has become the go-to version of the North Carolina lemon pie. It may have knocked chess pie, a famous dessert from the Tar Heel State, off the top spot.