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In my version of heaven, it is an endless summer, and everyone gets to eat pie for every meal. Butterscotch pie, coconut cream pie, chicken pot pie, custard pie, pecan pie, sweet potato pie, lemon meringue pie. Pie, pie, pie and more pie! My favorite pies, especially since I’ve deemed it a never-ending celestial summer, are the bounties of the season: blueberry, blackberry and raspberry pies, and God-must-have-invented peach pie — warm with butter pecan ice cream. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
You can’t get to heaven unless you like pie, but since I don’t know anyone who doesn’t, most of us — except for terrorists and producers of The Bachelor — stand a pretty good chance. I would venture to say pie is the most popular of all foods, especially when allied to the runner-up, ice cream. Why, I was at a dinner party the other night where the desserts — blueberry pie and apple pie — were even more popular than the alcohol. Ten adults hovered around the pies, making all sorts of clucking and cooing sounds, whispering little endearments and occasionally reaching out to caress or bend down to inhale the perfume of the fruity little darlings, all tucked under their flaky, buttery blankets. We bestowed lots of congratulatory praise on the pie maker, in hopes that we would be rewarded with the biggest piece, or even better — two pieces.
Post pie consumption — apple with slices of sharp Cabot white cheddar and apricot-y Sauterne, blueberry with coffee — we were convinced that certainly the pie maker must excel at all baking, such was the perfection of the pie.
“Do you make your own puff pastry?”
“Do you bake your own bread?”
“Do you churn your own butter?”
We wanted to know — had to know — so we could satisfy the mystery of perfect pie.
“No, we Dudleys just make pie. That’s what we’re good at,” she replied.
Sigh. Pure poetry.
Farmer’s wives perfected the American art of pie baking. Not only did these superwomen have pies to make, they looked after a half-dozen kids, put up a dozen pints of rhubarb jam, and finished the laundry … all before the men folk came home for lunch. Pies weren’t complex; they just tasted great. Having baked pies with my grandmother since I could kneel on a chair to roll out the dough, I’ve always related to the utter Zen-ness of pie baking. When I was a pastry chef, I often used a fruit pie as a litmus test for hiring assistants. Despite their diplomas, most of them made pretty lousy pies: They funked it all up, made it too complex.
Estrogen is not a required element for pie baking, by the way. You don’t have to be a “new bride,” according to Betty Crocker, baking “picture-pretty pies to please your husband.” Sure, whatever. John Rail, my pastry partner for several years, made “damn good pie” as they used to say on Twin Peaks.
Recently, after one of my lengthier discourses on all things pie (yes, I said lengthier, consider yourself lucky), someone asked me if I could live without it. Hmmm, I really had to think about that. A world without pie? Can you imagine? Where would we put four-and-twenty blackbirds? Without pie, the Three Stooges would be annoyingly hyperactive, and Soupy Sales would have had to re-think his career. Without pie, the diner scene in The Wild Ones with Marlon Brando would have ended up on the editing room floor: Substituting chocolate cake would have robbed the scene of its purity. Without pie, pi would have no homonym. Without pie, Don McClean would have sung, “Bye-bye, Miss American Tart.” It just doesn’t work. As you can see, without pie, it’s not merely a lack of pleasure or a wrinkle in our heritage: Our culture would be doomed.
I’ve lived without meat; I can do without brussels sprouts; I could endure a divorce from lox and bagels (after a two-year mourning period). But I can’t live without pie on earth — or in heaven — and I don’t believe you can either.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2003.