MY MOTHER, a Floridian by several generations, used to whip up key lime pies several at a time. She used bottled juice, canned sweetened-condensed milk and graham-cracker crusts. The only elemental ingredient was the egg — yolks for the filling and whites for the meringue.

It was my privilege as a schoolboy to crush the graham crackers for the crust, mix them with brown sugar and butter and press the resulting crumbly mass into the pie pans while my mother stirred the yolks into the sweetened-condensed milk for the filling.

Years later, as a professional chef, I sought a way to recapture the spirit of Mom's pies without the shortcuts. I made whole-wheat crackers with Plugra butter, lime curd with fresh Persian limes (Citrus latifolia), and crisp Swiss meringue. Thus deconstructed, the elements were served as a trio of complementary parts: Brown cookies, a squiggle of the yellow custard, and a pair of crisp meringue sticks were artfully arranged like a piece of modernist sculpture, garnished with a few sprigs of lemon balm.

Lime Curd, Crisp Meringues, and Homemade Graham Crackers © Greg Atkinson

Like many young chefs, determined to make every dish as "authentic" as it could be, I had determined early on that I would eschew processed foods in favor of pure, raw ingredients. It did not occur to me then that some worthy dishes were created using processed foods to start with, and any attempt to make them from raw ingredients would prove revisionist.

While I had assumed that Mom's version of the classic dessert, made with packaged foods, was a new-fangled version of a classic based on raw ingredients, hers was in fact the authentic dish; mine was the pretender. It turns out that residents of the Keys, cut off from the mainland, had to rely on canned sweetened-condensed milk from the time it was first marketed in 1859. Shelf-stable graham crackers were a staple there, too. The tiny, local limes (Citrus aurantiifolia ) have never been easy to procure outside the Keys, and the bottled juice is considerably closer in flavor than the juice of the larger and more commonly marketed Persian limes.

Even though I now know that Mom's version of key lime pie was just about as authentic as it could be, I still prefer my playful revisionist version. For one thing, the elements remain separate until the moment they are plated; this allows for a certain clarity of flavors and textures that would be lost if the "pie" were assembled in advance. For my taste, sweetened-condensed milk is too sweet, while fresh lime curd made with butter, sugar and egg yolks is rich but not cloying.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.