Next to brown sugar pie, this is my favorite chess pie. There are several theories as to how these pies came by their name. Some say that chess is a corruption of “chest,” meaning that these pies were so rich they could be stored in chests at room temperature. Others offer a different explanation: It seems that long ago when a good plantation cook was asked what she was making, she replied, Jes pie, which over time became chess. Still others insist that chess derives from “cheese,” as in the English lemon cheese (or curd). According to food historian Karen Hess, cheese was spelled chese in seventeenth-century England. In her historical notes and commentaries for the 1984 facsimile edition of Mary Randolph’s Virginia House-wife (1824), Hess writes: Since the archaic spellings of cheese often had but one 'e' we have the answer to the riddle of the name of that southern favorite ‘Chess Pie.' When I lived in New York, I baked dozens of lemon chess pies for the annual Gramercy Park fund-raiser and they sold as fast as I could unpack them. From that experience, I learned to buzz up the filling in the food processor. I even grate the lemon zest by processor. Here’s how: Strip the zest from the lemons with a swivel-bladed vegetable peeler, then churn it with the sugar to just the right texture. I next pulse in the lemon juice, then the eggs one by one. Finally, I drizzle the melted butter down the feed tube with the motor running. That’s all there is to it.