Parks, it seems, really did her due diligence and I don’t blame her for the claim. Before publishing she had consulted with a Florida historian who couldn’t find a substantiated recipe earlier than 1949. Florida folklore, though, posits that a woman named “Aunt Sally” created the pie, sometime in the 1890’s, for her millionaire boss in Key West. (I, for one, would also like to credit Aunt Sally more than a nameless ad man in 1930’s New York.) The reigning logic was that the condensed milk worked perfectly for the custard since fresh milk may have been harder to acquire in the string of islands, and that it was a twist on a sweet bread sponge fisherman would fashion out of stale Cuban bread, sweetened condensed milk, wild duck eggs, and a squeeze of lime. This has never exactly been substantiated. Imagine that – neither the sponge fisherman nor Aunt Sally took the measures to copyright their recipes in order to monetize them.

My point is, how often are recipes correctly attributed to their originators? How often do recipes truly have only one originator? Is oral history not a better tool to understand the social history of food than published recipes?

According to Food & Wine, David Sloan, author of The Key West Key Lime Cookbook was especially tussled by Parks’ claims. In addition to authoring the Key Lime Cookbook, he runs the Annual Key Lime Festival in Key West, where fairgoers can take part in key lime pie baking class or a key lime pie eating contest. In 2013 he helped stage a record breaking giant key lime pie, which was 8 feet in diameter and required the juice of nearly 6,000 limes – its specially made pan was the size of a pickup truck. Clearly, David Sloan has a vested interest in the answer about the pie’s origin – his life is the Key Lime. A local news outlet quoted Sloan as saying, “someone is trying to take away the Florida Keys’ culture, and I am not going to stand for it!” I’m admittedly half entertained by his response, but equally moved by his passionate plea.