Friday, December 10, 2004

The Life of Pie

I confess that I am still working through the stages of post-election grief by behaving exactly the way I do at funeral buffets: tucking into comfort food. Yes, I’ve turned from political pie charts to just plain ... pie. And this, along with the advent of the holiday season, has created a Perfect Storm of high-calorie, high-comfort dining. Humble and friendly, what could make a body feel better than pie?

Ah, pie! You practically have to smile to say it. Maybe this is the reason pie is inherently more fun, and more funny, than, say, tiramisù or a tart. It’s cream pie that gets tossed in slap-stick faces, after all – never a soggy trifle or a dour pudding. Legend has it that the “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” of nursery-rhyme fame was actually a court jester’s joke, turning a real delicacy (yup – people used to eat those little black-birdies) into a supper-time lark by placing a cooked pastry crust over live birds so that “when the pie was opened,” those birds would sing. Pie-larious!

Pie is primal. As ancient as Rome, it’s also the food of childhood memory. Think of the most delicious page in the classic children’s book, Harold and the Purple Crayon, in which the inventive protagonist, making a whole world with his crayon, draws up a fantasy picnic consisting only of “the nine kinds of pie that Harold liked best.” Food writer M.F.K. Fisher reminisces about a similar pie picnic from her childhood; she writes, “We stopped at a camp where there were some tables, and ate the whole peach pie, still warm from Irish Mary’s oven ... We poured cream from the jar onto the pieces Father cut for us, and thick sweet juices ran into delicious puddles.”

How many of us have pumpkin pie memories that pool on our taste buds this time of year? I remember a frosty day of hiking through covered bridges in New England, when three friends and I happened upon an authentic diner, as teensy as a tin cigar tube, just as the owner was pulling a deep-dish pumpkin pie out of the oven. She split the whole thing into four giant wedges for us, and served it in shallow bowls, still soft and hot, with whipped cream slopped and melting over the top. A pie-deal moment.

Of course, any cook knows it’s the pastry that gives the lie to “easy as pie,” and I’m afraid I practice the early American tradition of making a crust so tough, historically called a “coffyn,” it’s meant merely to transport the filling, rather than to be eaten. Mark Twain has a recipe for such a pastry in A Tramp Abroad. He writes, “Construct a bullet-proof dough. Toughen it and kiln-dry it a couple of days. Fill with stewed dried apple; aggravate with cloves, lemon peel and slabs of citron; add two portions of New Orleans sugar. Then solder on the lid and set it in a safe place until it petrifies. Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.”

When I started making my own pies from scratch, in my twenties, the shadow of my talented pastry-chef mother fell heavily over me, despite the fact that she had shared her own handwritten recipe, titled “You-Can’t-Screw-This-Up Pie Crust.” But I did, repeatedly, compulsively adding so much water that I produced beautifully molded and completely inedible crusts. After dinner parties, I’d notice that everyone had scraped their crusts clean of filling, leaving perfect, pale triangles of pastry sitting naked on their plates. I had a recurrent, practical fantasy of simply rinsing them off, flapping them dry, and reassembling them for the next pie.

My pastry problem was finally cured this Thanksgiving by She Who Eats Humble Pie, Martha Stewart, whose simple recipe for a 2-crust pastry evokes her stand-offish persona: Combine 2 ½ cups flour, ½ tsp salt, 1 tsp. sugar, 1 cup cold butter, and 1/4 cup ice water. Buzz in a food processor. And whatever you do: Don’t touch it. No fondling, no handling – no kidding. This cool method finally allowed me to produce mother-worthy pastry.

And with politics on the back burner, may I invoke another mother – Mother Jones – who famously admonished a dejected crowd in another stark political moment: “Don’t mourn, organize!” Mother is always right: Instead of numbing ourselves with pie, we’d do better to cook up something that will really sweeten the future. So come on – I’ll meet you in the kitchen.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on December 10, 2004
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