I come from pie people: People with principles. People who tended to be very thin or very fat (part of the family owned a candy store). People who believed that pie crust couldn’t be too rich or too thin. People who left the honorable task of producing pies to the bakers in the family. The baking line has dwindled, through my mother, who still produces all the Thanksgiving pies for our 25-strong feast, and on down to me.
As I grow into my own as a pie baker–still unpredictable and green in my early 30s–I play a behind-the-scenes roll in the updating of our family pie recipes. Time was when Crisco ruled. I’d say I cut my teeth on the stuff, but considering that the glossy white homogenized substance yields to a butter knife even when “frozen” that isn’t quite apt. In any case, I learned to make pie crust in an era before the discovery of trans fats, in a onetime-kosher family for whom solid vegetable shortening had great benefits over butter and lard. And I learned to make American pie from my Eastern European Jewish family like my predecessors might have learned to make strudel dough: Crusts were mixed with minimal water until just crumbly and barely dough-like, pounded into a disk and chilled to solidity, then finally rolled, with great determination, into the thinnest possible sheets. This combination of avoiding over-working the dough to keep it tender, then achieving the most gossamer thickness, was the ultimate goal. The Crisco made it both possible and desirable. A paper-thin, ultra-rich dough made to showcase good fruit filling, and to disguise the fact that the crust itself has no distinct flavor worth savoring. When your crust tastes like refrigerator, less is more.
Once rolled, my family pie crust has always been filled as simply as possible. The fruit, be it apples in the fall or berries, peaches or cherries in the summer, lightly dressed with lemon juice and sugar. The goal is to avoid over-sweetening at all costs. We also skimp on the thickener–tapioca for canned sour cherries, flour for everything else. And we never add seasonings–not even a whiff of cinnamon on the apples. Pumpkin pie is a different matter. Our recipe calls for heavy cream, dried ginger, eggs, a can of Libby’s of course, brown sugar, and a nice glug of Scotch. The custard bakes up with a wrinkled, often slightly cracked skin on top that is made for vanilla ice cream, and not for weird kitchen-science calisthenics designed to “solve” the crack. Cherry and other juicy summer pies get lattice crusts, apples get a covered, vented crust, and pumpkin pie naturally goes topless. The point: to use as much filling as the crust can handle. We walk a thin line.
Before the perfectly crimped beauties are slid into the oven, top crusts are brushed with milk for browning. Others might use a pastry brush for this task, but our family pastry brush has always been redolent of the garlic-and-butter baste we give chicken, so a strip of thick paper towel is used. Baking is hot (425˚) and on the bottom shelf, the semi-transparent Pyrex pan allowing the baker to check for doneness, the outer crust often covered with tin foil to slow its precocious browning. Doneness is declared when the fruit juices bubble thickly and, usually, messily (thanks to the minimal use of thickening starch) and the bottom is golden brown. Cooling is interminable and incomplete.
Serving the pie a time of gratuitous praise, a la mode, and eating is hushed, studious, appreciative on the part of everyone but the baker, who persists in self-abnegation. Too tough. Too sweet. Too juicy. Under-baked. Ruined by insipid fruit or a leak or tear in the crust. The half-eaten pie will be stored under plastic and finished with plain yogurt for breakfast.
My mother continues to churn out pies, and I make several each season as well. But now, thanks to a modern focus on flavor and a glut of cookbooks and articles with a lot to say on the topic, we use butter. I sometimes cut the butter with one third rendered leaf lard from the Greenmarket–or the new trans-fat-free Crisco–but my mother has gone wholeheartedly over to the butter side. It’s a fat, flaky side, and the risk of underdoneness is heightened. You simply cannot achieve a super-thin butter pie crust. Luckily, everyone with taste buds agrees that butter is delicious.
My own pie supremacy is somewhat hindered by my inconstancy, and for this I’d like to blame the media (and, er, food writers who write about how to make the best pie ever, ahem). I’ve read recipe after recipe, tried grating in frozen butter, counting pulses in the food processor, before or after rolling, freezing the whole damn pie before baking, brushing the inside with egg whites, the outside with cream. It’s all pretty much the same. When you apply apt pie principles, everyone praises the pie. Except you. You know there’s always room for improvement, so you should probably get off your behind and bake another pie.
photo: Changing New York / Berenice Abbott
