pies I Have Known

February 20, 2000

PIES I HAVE KNOWN

After the experts convinced me that lard was wicked I pretty much gave up on pie crust. Then the Cuisinart food processor turned up, and while pie crust would never again taste really good, it would at least be easy and reliable. The MiddleMan arrived from Nebraska just after I bought the processor. He installed it, I pulled rhubarb, and in half an hour we had a Rhubarb Cream Pie in the oven with a Processor Crust.

Our treasured four acres were cut out of more or less the center of a 350 acre farm. The ancient fruit trees were not on our land, but no one cared about the fruit except the birds and the deer. Halfway up the mountain there was an apple tree that bore green-turning-yellow apples the third week in August, perfect for pies and applesauce. We never learned their name. We made pie. We froze prepared apples in pie pans ready for pie later. We made applesauce. At first we peeled each apple, and used the ricer. As the supply got ahead of us we just cut out the cores and the bee holes, and decided we liked the taste of the skins, after the food processor had dealt with them. What's to say about an apple pie recipe? Good apples, a little cinnamon, sugar brown or white, eat it hot. It's been three years since I checked that tree.

Pumpkin pie is different. Each family grows up with certain seasonings, or with Mrs. Smith and that's the way it must be. Ours came from a little free Spry booklet, with minor changes in spices. The heyday of Pumpkin Pie here was while we had a cow and chickens. When the cow was fresh and the cream on the bucket was 2 inches deep, and we had eggs enough to sell extras, and the pumpkin came from the garden, that was pumpkin pie. This year, after 79 Thanksgivings, I bought a pie from Mrs. Smith. The Eldest and I voted that it was not bad at all. Actually the first pumpkin we ate here didn't come from the garden. The MiddleMan proudly wheeled a barrow full of Cushaw Pumpkin, although we didn't know its name then, into the front yard . Immense pale green things with darker green stripes. He found them in a corn field on top of the mountain, and believes to this day that they were growing wild. Our farmer mentor said no way, but he didn't see any way to get them back to their rightful owner, so we kept them. The Middle Man may be right. I've had some wonderful Cushaws since, planted by birds. On the other hand, the MiddleMan was so famous for " finding" canoes, when he was 7 or 8, that when anyone missed a boat they just came to ask him where it was. There are a lot of things parents never know.

There used to be wonderful peanut butter pie at the 76 Truck Stop where Interstates 81 and 83 meet north of Harrisburg, PA. I never found a recipe that came close. I did better with Grasshopper Pie, but having made this recipe once, to be sure it tasted like the one in the restaurant, I would never make it again. This is a reading recipe, and even reading it might be dangerous and make you go eat some equally evil thing.

In the Canadian Rockies, empty miles from anything else, was a small square building with a sign "Just Pie." The woman who ran it was able to make enough pies to allow a tour bus to stop. It's hard for a little thing like a perfect pie to compete with those mountains, but the scenery and the pie were of the same quality.

Cranberry Chiffon Pie is fairly dangerous too, but it is so obviously meant for holidays only that I'm never tempted to make it just for instance. It's a lovely color. Especially good for the light snack four hours after the turkey.

A hydrofoil boat on the Klamath River in Oregon pulled up to a small dock so we could climb about a hundred steps up to a tiny restaurant for lunch. I don't know what else I ate there, but I had a piece of wild huckleberry pie. The berries were about 1/8" diameter. I don't understand how there was time to pick enough to fill a pie, and bake the pie, before lunch, but I'm glad somebody did. If you need to pick a lot of berries, punch two holes near the top of a one pound coffee can, knot a rope end outside each hole, leaving a rope long enough to go around your neck. This leaves one hand free to hold the bush and the other free to pick, and keeps you from spilling all you've picked as you reach for just one more. Keep dumping the berries into pint boxes or a pail. I learned this picking raspberries for a dollar a pint. My record day was 27 pints. There is a good reason for the high cost of fruit.

Near where the Klamath runs into the Pacific, the townspeople had built a strong and roomy pen as a home for a young black steer they had rescued when he got washed out to sea in a storm. He was extremely well fed, but not on pie.

Perhaps it is time to explain to the family why I can't stand Mother's Day. In an effort to explain to himself, I guess, why our marriage was not blissful, Pater Familias had decreed that we would be better off if I stopped seeing my mother. We lived in a town then. I had already made a beautiful lemon meringue pie, her favorite, for a Mother's day gift. When this edict came out, I asked the MiddleMan, who was maybe five years old at that point, to carry it the half- mile to her house. A light rain started as soon as he left, but he made it all the way, with the pie right side up. Mother managed not to cry while he was watching. She called to tell me he was safe, and drove him home. The decree didn't survive very long. It was hard for both of us to learn that the rule of Father Knows Best about everything, that we had both been brought up to believe, just didn't hold up. Divorce was not an option for most people then, because of economics and conviction, so we had to thrash out other ways of going on together. But no amount of discussion ever restored Mother's Day for my mother or for me. Furthermore, here in the country, it is almost always on Mother's Day that I see the first snake of the season. It may be only a garter snake, but a snake is a snake, Emily Dickinson's "narrow fellow in the grass" who brings "a zero at the bone."

The other infamous pie in my life is Key Lime. Mother died very suddenly when I hadn't even started to understand that it had to happen some day. My brother, his wife, and I joined my father in St. Pete for the funeral, got father into the car more or less on time, and set off on a fairly long drive. Mother's only request was not to be buried in the prairie wind. She had loved the hills and trees of north Jersey, so we found a little rise in the Florida ground, among some live oaks, at Inverness. About half way there, father decided he absolutely must have a piece of Key Lime Pie. Before that, it had been our impression that every eating place in Florida served this, but not so that day. We were determined to be on time for the funeral, and grew frantic stopping at one place after another until at last we found the by then accursed pie. I can still eat lemon meringue pie but Key Lime is out. I somewhat share father's attitude toward a funeral. If you can think of enough reasons not to go, perhaps you can put off believing that person has really left you. I know one purpose of the funeral is to help us accept reality, but I don't have to like it.