And So Flaky, Too

It's pie season around here again and I'm gathering all my ingredients, but I usually run out of something. Flour, patience. You come up short a half cup of patience and it's liable to make all your pies damp, scabby and airborne. It probably doesn't help with the patience supply that it's election season, but unless I make all my pies in January of an odd-numbered year I'm just going to have to soldier on. I am writing this post in advance of actually putting the pies together, because afterwards I will be drinking strenuously, which affects my computer screen.

I bake all my pies and freeze them. Some people freeze them unbaked. I didn't know which was better so I Googled it. The first eight articles that came up contradicted each other. The only thing they all agree on is that the pies are good in the freezer for "up to four months." I have eaten pies that have been in the freezer for three years. They tasted great. Know why? They're pie. I am already pre-aggravated because I'm about to start making pie, and I find it aggravating that there's no consensus on this. If any of you have any great tips on freezing pies, keep them to yourself.

There are several pie crust recipes I've been known to use, the tastiest of which is Mary Ann's famous hazelnut crust, which I use exclusively for the huckleberry pies on account of their preciousness. It takes hours to pick enough fish-egg-sized berries for one pie in a good year, and this is not a good year. Mary Ann and I went up to the mountain to pick and ended up lurching across ravines and through stickery bush patches just because we thought we saw a bush with three berries on it the size of mouse eyes. We put in five hours and I think I'll have enough for a single pie if I don't filter out the fir needles, spiders, and deer poop. The good news is, that means I only need to roll out two hazelnut crusts this year. You can seriously run down your serenity stash with a hazelnut crust.

So, for the other pies, I've decided to go with good ol' Mom's pie crust recipe. It, at least, gets me in a good mood to begin with. It's typed on a yellowed piece of notebook paper and pasted into my recipe book. Mom typed five thousand words a minute and, most years, didn't get her first typo until mid-May. So there are no typos in this recipe. It's called "Foolproof Piecrust," which is more alarming to me than reassuring. With a mind for provenance, Mom typed at the top "From Woman's Day 11/74" and "Bobbie sent it to me." From this I conclude it isn't her original pie crust recipe from my childhood, but I won't know the difference, because I was a picky eater and never tried  her pie. I didn't think I'd like it because it didn't look like cake. When I finally ate Mom's apple pie as an adult, I wondered if a person could eat retroactive pie.

Foolproof Piecrust is made with vegetable shortening. So it's easier to make now because of one of the great modern inventions: Crisco in stick form. When I first started making pie, I'd have to come up with 3/4 cups shortening by filling a measuring cup with 1/4 cup water and blobbing in spoonfuls of Crisco  until the water comes up to the one-cup mark, then pouring out the water. This was how it was taught to me in Home Ec (for you young people, this is the course in which you learn how to make a gingham apron, a cheeseball, and how to apply makeup, but you still won't know how to make an ashtray or an end table). It results in slimy hands, watery shortening, and another slice out of your serenity, and it still won't be accurately measured. The Crisco sticks eliminate all that. They come in individual plastic tubs that will swirl around in the ocean for millions of years, but I never said I was a perfect liberal.

It also calls for a large egg. I have never seen a recipe that calls for any other size egg. And I never have known whether they want an egg graded Large or if they want a large egg. After all, there are Extra Large and Jumbo eggs, and those are really large. Today, it doesn't matter. I only have a Medium egg, so  in it goes. Already I am challenging the Foolproof part. And I resent it. Why should the success of my pies have to depend on the embouchure of a chicken sphincter?

The Foolproof Piecrust claims to make enough crust for 2-1/2 to 3 double-crust pies. Mom typed this at the bottom:

"Mommie's notes: I probably roll mine extra thin, but I get enough for five double-crust pies." Holy shit, Mom.

The only reason a person could successfully roll out and transfer pie crust thin enough to read the directions through is that that person is pure of heart and full of goodness. I'll never be able to do it. But thanks, Mom, for reminding me every year why I loved you so much.

September 7 would have been my mommy's 99th birthday. 

Crusty Old Broad

I just had yet another birthday, which is as good a time as any to think about death. This year's observation: we're told that people on the cusp of death see their lives flash before them in a chronological series of memories, like a slide show. I have discovered that the exact same thing happens in the process of baking a pie, except in reverse order, and with only the wretched memories, and nobody needs to die unless they're in the same room with the baker.

It's pie season around here, when I make all the pies for the whole year in order to confine the aggravation to one short period, and then I slam them all in the freezer to think about what they've done. I'm the baker in this household, not from any particular talent for it, but by default, since Dave refuses to follow a recipe per se and prefers to let inspiration be his guide. He fired himself from the baking chores after once trying to assemble cookies out of butter, flour and sugar (but no baking powder). That is still known as the Sugar Puck Incident, and if we had not found a nice pothead willing to take them home and suck on them, they might be in the landfill, unchanged, to this day. Anyway, I am willing to follow a recipe, but what works fine one time doesn't work the next, and lacking any understanding of how things work, I'm helpless to diagnose the problem, and have to resort to Renaming. This results in a lot of Crumbles, and Fallen Angel Food, and Lava Frosting, and Egg Custard Pebbles, and Oopsie Flambe, and Holy Shitcakes, and I Can't Believe It's Not Rising. Mine is a natural, unstudied, serendipitous method that others prefer to call incompetence.

Pie season 2011 got off to a rocky start. The blackberries were large and luscious and would probably have baked up nicely if I had been able to correctly adjust the amount of thickener to account for the extra cup of fruit-fly maggots that had distributed themselves throughout the haul. These pies are hard to put a shine on, but I'm going to give them a good five months in the slammer, dub them Amnesia Pie and see how that goes over.

It was the famous Huckleberry Hazelnut pie that produced the near-death experience. Mary Ann came up with the recipe and she doesn't have any trouble making it come out right, but she knows what she's doing, and where's the challenge in that? Pie crust is supposed to have just enough liquid added to get the butter and flour on speaking terms. By the time I added all my ingredients, my food processor was full of soup. I poured it into a dish and refrigerated it, and miraculously, it firmed up. I centered it in a halo of flour, a plump, perfect patty, my little Pangaea, and then it went tectonic. In a short dozen rolls of the pin, the crust had separated into seven continents adrift on the cutting board. I assessed the situation over several large, frosty mugs of serenity. I thought I could get it all to come together with more flour, a colder rolling pin and about 250 million years. Dave backed slowly out of the room.

The immediate danger to bystanders is past and the renaming process has begun. You're all welcome to come over for some of my dammit dammit dammit dammit famous you dirty low-down bastard son-of-a-Republican hazelnut don't you come stumbling in here at four in the morning, you can just sleep right there on the floor where you passed out crust none of my friends have to be home by ten o'clock huckleberry I thought you were my best friend cinnamon doo-doo-head and butter mommy mommy mommy mommy Marie Callender's Thaw & Serve Coconut Cream Pie.

Labors of Love

Mary Ann Dabritz

We've all heard of a labor of love. This refers to any task so odious, so frustrating, so destructive of the temperament that no amount of money could ever induce you to do it. Only love could make you this miserable. Labors of love might include cutting a pattern out of silk. Or knitting (anything). Or, in my house, the annual production of the hazelnut-huckleberry pie. Pie-making in general needs a lot of love behind it, because some of it is going to be destroyed in the process, never to return, and you want there to be some affection left over. They're all a pain. A blackberry pie is preceded by a loss of blood and some scarring. Apple pie always ends up looking like fruit sludge with an attic over it.

The particular treatment of huckleberries in this household comes down from the amazing Mary Ann, who whomps up her own recipes out of sheer exuberance and disdain for standard ingredients. Huckleberries are particularly dear due to their scarcity, and a plain crust does them less honor than a crust made with hazelnuts, which, in spite of what you may have guessed, is the State Nut. Mary Ann makes up things on the fly and uses anything available as long as it's not sugar, in spite of which they taste just fine.

In many ways, she's an artifact, an escapee from the nineteenth century who could have spanked a Conestoga expedition into shape. Once when a group of us went to our mountain cabin for a winter retreat and discovered it minus electricity, we all groaned and repaired to the nearest tavern for beer and pizza whilst waiting for the linemen to hook us back up. Not Mary Ann. She couldn't have been tickleder at the prospect of Making Do. She resolutely stayed behind to see what she could spank up, and as we scritched the ice off the inside of the windows, we told her to have a cake ready when we came back.

We returned to a crackling fire, a respectable sixty-degree temperature, lit candles that were probably made on the spot out of boiled shrew hides, and the unmistakable smell of cake baking over the wood stove. There were no particular cake ingredients in the place, and the contents were a mystery, some without a doubt scraped up off the forest floor. But it was delicious. If she'd have found a bigger mammal, she'd probably have had a wheel of cheese started.

So one of the problems with huckleberries is the picking. It's a pleasant-enough process, but you're an hour into it before you've covered the bottom of the bucket. At minimum wage, a pie's-worth of huckleberries should run you about forty bucks. Every year we go up on the mountain to scavenge our berries and in a very good year we might get enough for five pies. This was not a good year. Mary Ann and I picked for an hour and together we didn't get much more than pancake spangles.  I told Dave the sad news and he promptly donned the stricken look I last saw on him when we found out Roots Brewery was closing down.

The Entire 2010 Huckleberry Haul

When you really love someone, and he really loves hazelnut huckleberry pie, you'll do anything to remove that stricken look, and there's only one thing that will work. Pie crusts are crazy-making. They shouldn't even be attempted for all but about five days out of the month during a woman's reproductive years. A nut crust ups the ante. The crusts are rolled between sheets of wax paper to keep the tears of rage off the dough, and with great care and a hip-hop vocabulary, they can sometimes be transferred to a pie plate in one or two shreddy pieces. They will not be transferred to the state fair.

With a quick glance at our berry haul, during which I was able to get an accurate count of individual berries, I selected a two-inch ramekin from the cupboard and had at it. A single hazelnut huckleberry pie out of my kitchen would run you about a hundred forty bucks, including time in and the exasperation tariff. A two-inch pie? Priceless.

Although somebody's going to pay.

Mine. Go get your own.

Mary Ann does everything for love, but if you want to take a look at what she does for money, take a stroll around A Cast Of Characters. There is no better source on this planet for genuine bronze Otterhound door knockers, among many, many other things. And yes, I do have salamander cabinet pulls.