More than a Pie

I wrote the following piece a year ago. Saturday's was my mother's birthday. My brother and I toasted her and wished her a happy birthday. Cold nights have an extra snap when there's one less person in the world to love you.

I rarely bake, but yesterday I made a pie. Mind you, this was no ordinary pie. The pie I baked yesterday came from my mother’s recipe box and was seasoned with my own memories.

“Save your forks,” my mother would say with a smile whenever dinner was to be topped off by one of her pies. On cold, Sundays during the dark, gray Michigan winters, my brother and I would help my mother bake pies in a tiny, windowed kitchen warmed by a waiting oven and our own eager expectations.

A piece of my mother’s pie required a special way of eating--never mixing a mouthful of piecrust with the filling. The filling needed to be carefully mined away from the layers of crust, which often called for very precise fork work.

My mother made the most wonderful pie crusts, light and flaky with a special flavor that is rooted deep within the taste buds of my heart. She didn’t follow a recipe. She mixed and kneaded by taste and feel. When we found her recipe box, her method for piecrust was the first card in the deck. I call it a method because it isn’t a recipe in the classic sense. Her instructions are simple and vague—2-crust pie: 2 cups flour (dash salt?), ¾ cup oil, add milk to measure almost one cup. That was it.

From these instructions, I am left to my own methods and memories. I don’t know much about baking, but I can follow recipes. And though I’m not a sophisticated cook, my dishes are tasty and digestible. Actually, I cook like I play golf; first I head this way, then I head that way, and eventually I reach the green. So it is with my cooking style. Ingredients are everywhere, pots here, and cutlery there, but eventually it all comes together.

I don’t know why I made the pie. It was just a feeling, perhaps a need. However, armed with my mother’s rudimentary instructions, I gathered the ingredients, the bowl, the pie tin, and the wax paper. After stirring the ingredients by hand, I dipped my finger in the bowl to taste the mix. Ahhhh. The sweet taste fired fond memories of a childhood spent in my mother’s kitchen, and of her gently slapping my probing fingers away from the bowl.

My confidence soars and my heart swells with the first taste of the piecrust I’m making in my own kitchen. It tastes vaguely familiar, but seems more viscous than memory dictates. I spread flour on the wax paper waiting on the countertop and prepare for the next crucial step, forming the dough into a crust.

I plunge both hands into the bowl and pull up a good-sized lump of dough. Something seems wrong when most of the dough sticks to my hands. Undeterred, I scrape off as much as I can and deposit it onto the wax paper. After placing another sheet of wax paper on top of the dough, I begin to flatten the dough with the rolling pin, and stop when it becomes pie-sized round. Time to peel the wax paper away from the dough, but it won’t budge!

The wet sticky dough clings to the wax paper like glue. With no way to get the dough from the wax paper into the pie tin, I wad up the whole mess, march to the garage, and drop it in the trash bin.

I start over. This is an empirical exercise, and I deduce that flour needs to be added to both sheets of wax paper in order to extricate the dough. I recombine the ingredients, and fight the 2nd generation of dough onto the floured wax paper. I place the now floured second sheet of wax paper carefully over the dough, and flattened the mound with a rolling pin. Nuts! The dough still refuses to separate from the wax paper. And so again, the wax-papered bundle is scooped up and spiked into the trash bin with such a fury that I hear a mighty splat as it came to rest. I am ready to call it a day.

For all my efforts, there is nothing to show but the flour and bits of dough littering the kitchen countertops. I gather the dough and flour together by hand, and to my astonishment a recognizable dough ball forms. After rolling the dough in the flour for a few more minutes, I flatten the small piece, place it in a baking pan and toss it into the oven, just like my mother did. She always made more crust than was needed for a pie and baked the “scraps” along with the pie. Because the pies were always saved for dessert, the scraps were our immediate reward for our work in the kitchen. This “scrap” would be an early litmus test of my baking abilities.

In 15 minutes I remove the “scraps” from the oven. Eureka! The baked “scrap” passes the taste and consistency test. For the third time in less than one hour, I mix the familiar ingredients. This time I dump the dough onto one sheet of wax paper and roll it liberally in flour. I flatten the dough and spread more flour over it, and flatten some more. Then I put the pie tin over the dough and quickly reverse their positions. Voila! The dough separates from the wax paper evenly and effortlessly, and covers the entire pie tin.

While heading for the pantry to get the can of fruit filling, I come to a quick, hard stop. I had forgotten to grease the pie tin. Panicked, I pull the dough from the pie tin, toss it back onto the floured wax paper, and grease the pie tin. Once again, I gather the dough into a ball and roll it flat. After successfully reversing the wax paper and pie tin, I remove the wax paper, trim excess dough from the edges of the pie and add the fruit filling. I gather the trimmed dough and roll it flat and then place it on top of the fruit filling. I now have a two-crust pie. After kneading the top ridges of the pie in my mother’s signature style, my pie is ready for the oven.

Mother left no directions for oven temperature or for baking time, so I go by sight and smell. I set the oven for 375 degrees and reach for the crossword puzzle on the kitchen table. Twenty-five sweet-smelling minutes later my pie is cooling, the crossword completed.

Though this was a solo effort, the kitchen was full of familiar joy and love when the pie came from the oven. My crust wasn’t bad. My mother’s was better. My pies will taste fine in time, as my mother and I bake together again in the years to come.

Happy birthday, mom.