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Last week I wrote about childhood memories, specifically, fishing with my dad. In it I mentioned my grandmother taught me how to bake the perfect apple pie. I received fun emails suggesting I give grandma equal time. What an absolutely fabulous idea.
My grandmother was quite a cook. In fact, she cooked for large affluent households for many years. Meals for the well-to-do families as well as banquets and huge social events for them. Simple food prepared perfectly.
She was known to all as Grammy though she only had one grandchild. [Guess who?] Even her friends called her Grammy. My friends called her Grammy. Her own kids called her Grammy. And Grammy could cook. She could have had her own TV show because she was adorable. But this little piece isn’t about her cooking—it’s about her baking. The art of baking. And it is indeed an art and a labor of love. For it is laborious.
I can cook but I’m not going to have my own TV show. I like cooking well enough but now that the kids are grown I don't cook a lot. I’ll pull out our favorite recipes and add one or two new ones when I entertain or during the holidays but they are standard fare type meals. No one has died eating at my table and no one goes home hungry. I guess there’s something to be said for that.
While I enjoy cooking I have never developed a passion for baking. I usually create desserts that don't require flour. Or I purchase something nice from the market. Usually around the holidays grocers bring out special items not seen during the year and they are quite nice and very pretty. Yet, I do bake cookies once in a while during the holidays (if they make it to the oven before I eat the raw dough) and sometimes I’ll make a cake (from scratch, not a box), and the point of this posting: I can make a pie to die for. More specifically, I can make a flaky piecrust. It’s not easy and it takes lots of practice and it also takes training from an expert. I had that in Grammy.
So when I was about seven or eight Grammy decided it was time for me to learn how to make a proper piecrust. As I mentioned last week, she believed a perfect pie would secure for me a perfect husband. [She was wrong.] The training began then and never really stopped. I was “forced” to bake pies my entire childhood. The pies were usually apple, her favorite, but any filling was fine with her. She didn’t care. You could put gravel in a pie and if the piecrust was flaky, people would eat it.
The most important part of making pie dough is to leave the damn glob alone. By the time she assembled all the ingredients in a bowl it looked like a big pile of flour held together with air. She barely touched it. I thought she was nuts. She encouraged me to work it and stopped me almost immediately after my little fingers barely touched it. “But Grammy, it’s all falling apart.” Yeah, that was the point.
Over the years I’ve watched people make piecrusts and could barely contain my horror. Even on TV shows. I thought they were going to sculpt the dough like clay, maybe make a little statue of their dog. In fact, they beat the poor thing to death (the pie dough, not their dog). No, no, no. (I can hear her still.) Pie dough can be made in food processors I understand but I haven’t tried that. I may but why? Can I improve on perfection? (Probably.)
Recently my daughter and I baked pies and she hadn’t made a piecrust before and was dying to scrunch it all together in a tidy ball, similar to what she did in kindergarten with PlayDough. It took great restraint for me to not pop her over the head with the rolling pin. She didn’t believe me! She cried, “But mom, it’s all falling apart!” History does indeed repeat itself. It was me all over again.
We baked four pies that day. The reason for four pies is it’s such a pain in the you-know-what to make the pie dough and clean up the huge mess it makes that Grammy thought we might as well make as many as possible. For us that day it was four. Two for us and two for a 90-year-old gentleman who had recently lost his wife. His wife had baked for him every day. One day he asked my daughter as she was going for a walk if she knew how to bake a pie. She said yes. Slightly prematurely, I might add.
Her first thought was she would buy a pre-made piecrust. I explained that would work for anyone born after 1950 but if she was making it for a 90-year-old man whose wife baked for him every day it wasn’t going to cut it. She didn’t mind and in fact was eager to learn. [heh heh heh]
So the first thing she couldn’t believe is that the fridge was filled with all our pie ingredients, including my rolling pin. My rolling pin has a feature my Grammy would have loved: it’s a tube that holds ice water or ice cubes. The reason for that is that while handling piecrust everything must be icy cold because if it isn’t the butter (b-u-t-t-e-r, not margarine or shortening) will start to melt and make handling the dough a disaster. You see, and this is so important, butter makes the pie flaky and it will melt in your mouth. Such a pie makes the creator a superstar.
So we sifted and measured the flour and added salt and put Grammy’s bowl (which I have had all these years) back in the fridge. Next we took the butter out of the fridge and cut it into tiny squares with a sharp knife and put the tiny pieces back in the fridge. Next we measured out ice water. We placed it back in the fridge. At this point we were fatigued so we sat down and had coffee.
After arguing about my pie dough methods during our coffee break we pulled the bowl out and put the giant wooden breadboard on our counter. We did not dust it with flour, which would toughen the crust. Instead, we placed eight sheets of waxed paper on the counter, cut to the size of a typical pie tin. We removed the bowl from the fridge then tossed the tiny pieces of butter, individually, on top of the flour. We then GENTLY incorporated the little pieces quickly into the flour but did not mash the flour around the butter. We more or less tossed the little pieces. Then it went back in the fridge.
While the butter cooled down again we both checked our emails and made a couple of phone calls. I considered another cup of coffee but didn’t want coffee jitters during this delicate process. We met back in the kitchen at the appointed time and took the bowl out---again. We poured small quantities of the iced water into the bowl and I then quickly moved the flour, butter, and water around into almost a ball but not quite a ball. It resembled loose flour more than a ball. It was falling apart and could barely hold together. It was perfect. Back in the fridge.
We went our separate ways for about fifteen minutes (it was best) then returned to the kitchen. I placed a piece of the pre-cut waxed paper on the breadboard and retrieved the bowl from the fridge. I dumped a section of the contents of the bowl on the waxed paper then took my hands and softly and gently and quickly pushed the sides all around once or twice and sort of patted the top. My daughter was horrified. By now she would have been halfway to sculpting the Mona Lisa and could not believe I wasn’t going to form this thing into a gooey ball. I went to the fridge and grabbed the rolling pin and she backed off. I guess it looked like I was going to strike her with it. Silly girl.
I placed a sheet of waxed paper on top of my little pile of barely touched flour and gently rolled and pushed, always away from me from the middle out. Soon a pattern developed: roll and push, turn the paper, roll and push, turn the paper.
In a very short period of time we had our first pie shell flattened and EVENLY rolled. The butter did it. It softened as I rolled. We didn’t touch it. We put the rolled sheet back in the fridge along with the bowl. We did this seven more times. Four pies, eight pie shells, tops and bottoms. Each time we finished the mess went back in the fridge.
My daughter was sick of the dough and ready to work on the apples. She selected the apple pie filling from a recipe she found online and it was a nice one. So we both peeled and sliced and seasoned the apples. We then took our first two refrigerated pie shells that had barely been touched by human hands, and peeled off the top piece of waxed paper. It slipped right off. Not sticking. Why? C-o-l-d butter! We inverted the pie pan on top of the dough then turned the pan over quickly and removed the remaining piece of waxed paper. Next we gently aligned the crust in the pan and formed it a little but not too much because we would finish that with the top crust.
Finally, we filled it to overflowing with a nice mound of the seasoned thinly sliced apples in the middle and gently (I’ve used gently a number of times here) placed the apple slices around neatly then plopped the remaining shell on top. Naturally, I have a pie dough crimping tool that I’ve had forever and once the pie is put together the tool runs around the edge and makes a seam and crunches it together and trims it decoratively. We also have a special way to decorate our pie tops: we take a serrated knife and cut slits resembling slices on the top crust so that the pie filling will bubble out a little but also the knife cuts indicate a perfect piece of pie when cutting it to serve. We finished the top with a wash of heavy cream and an egg yoke beaten together then brushed over the top before baking.
We stuck them in the oven and baked them.
By this time it was late afternoon so we switched to wine. We sat at the table waiting for the pies to cook and peeked at them through the glass oven door, as they became visions of beauty. We took them out and placed one pie on each burner on top of my stove. They were breathtaking. I was overcome with emotion at that point remembering years ago doing the same thing with my Grammy. The little 90-year-old recipient my daughter did this for was likewise moved remembering his wife when my daughter presented him with his pies.
That’s the perfect part about making a perfect pie. It’s the history of making something wonderful to share. It’s a labor of love. It’s sort of a lost art. Things that take time and effort are special. And we learn about timing, detail, pushing through a tough project (and not whining), discovering we can do a difficult task, and making those we care about happy. Perfect lessons to learn by simply baking a perfect pie.
[Next week, my son and baking a cake from scratch! True story.]
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