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.

Budweiser and Mullets

The best make it seem effortless. Marshall Faulk rushed for an easy 178 yards versus the hometown Cardinals last Sunday. Faulk's speed is deceptive, from the stands anyway; his strides are long and graceful, his shoulders always pointed upfield. On sweeps and pitch plays, Faulk made the corner and headed upfield in two step, three steps max. Once on the corner, he'd accelerate past tacklers or change directions quickly. Each times he left Cardinal defenders grasping in his wake. It was no accident that the cornerbacks and safeties led the team in tackles. Marshall glided by the defensive line and linebackers all day long.

Sunday was a glorious day for football. Temps were in the low to mid 70s and not a drop of humidity for hundreds of miles. Brilliant sunshine refelcted the deep green of the gridiron, the Cardinal red, and the Rams blue and gold. Lori and I walked up to the Stadium just before kickoff, bought a couple of tickets, and found our corner of the endzone seats with only minutes to spare. We were in the walk-up section of seats meaning that we were surrounded by Cardinal and Ram fans who were in full throat frenzy when the Cardinals kicked off to the Rams.

I'd never seen the Rams play before. Growing up, the Rams helmets were the most exotic headgar in all football. In the 1950s, that deep blue helmet with the gold ram horn twisting toward the earhole was nonpareil. A kid in our neighborhood, Jimmy Pierce, had a real Riddell Rams helmet. It was many sizes too large for his melon, and it swivelled on his head as he ran down the field. Nonetheless, he was the envy of everyone in the neighborhood, and, generously, he gave everyone a chance to wear it. In the days before the network doubleheader, we'd see the Rams whenever they played the Lions. When they played in L.A. the game would come on TV late on a Sunday afternoon. The bright, sunny L.A. afternoon always stood in stark contrast to chilly, dark E.L., especially if the game was played in November or December.

Today's Rams helmets have been modernized. The horns are thicker and wider, and they're more gold now than yellow. These aren't the L.A. Rams any more. They're the St. Louis Rams. The Hollywood mystique is long gone. They're Midwest now. The Rams used to be about beauty and celebrity. Now they're about mullets and Budweiser.
Nonetheless, they have Marshall Faulk whose name should grace the "best of" list of players of his time.

The game became sluggish soon after kickoff. The Cardinals couldn't get anything figured out offensively. The Rams, led by Faulk's brilliant rushing, set off on a couple of long, unspectacular drives. At halftime, the score stood Rams 17 Cardinals 7. By the third quarter, things started to get interesting in the stands. The Rams fans in attendance, most of whom were either St. Louis transplants or front runners who adopted the Rams, were situated in clumps throughtout the east side of the stadium. One section over was composed of equal parts Ram and Cardinal fans. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw five or six large cups of beer in mid-flight. They landed on target in the middle of the Rams contingent. Everyone in our section rose simultaneously to see what was happening. I couldn't see much. I did see equal parts fists and beer flying as a couple of rows of Cardinals and Rams fans converged. Security rushed in. State Troopers rushed in. A few more fists flew accompanied by much pushing and shoving. Most football fights last a couple of punches. This fight lasted for a couple minutes. The State Troopers captured the main combatants and dragged them kicking and yelling from the stands. I couldn't tell if they miscreants were Cards or Rams fans. They'd gotten they're monies worth whoever they were.

We went to the Cardinals v. Cowboys game last year. It was a fightening affair. Yes, the football was awful, but the scene in the stand was worse. Long before the Cardinals moved to Arizona, the Cowboys spent considerable time and effort marketing their games in the Southwest and in Mexico. They're are a couple of generations of Spanish speaking Cowboy fans in AZ. (There are a couple of generations of cowboy Cowboy fans in AZ, too, but they're fewer in number to their Latino compadres.) Cowboy v. Cardinal games are edgy affairs. Latino Cowboy fans square off against Latino Cardinal fans. Last year, an entire section in the upper deck went at it. Walking out of the game, we saw a pair of lightweights and a pair of featherweights in full street fight mode.

I am not going anywhere near the Raider game this year.