piecrust2

About that pie crust. . . 

 

When we were first married, Iz and I moved sight unseen into a tiny apartment in Seattle. Leaving California was an adventure. But after a few months of nasty notes left on our car telling us to “go home” and the onset of less than warm weather, homesickness set in. Big time. And I did want good southern girls do when they’re homesick. I baked.

I’d always been a baker. Not much of cook, but I am a veritable Rumpelstiltskin with sugar.  However, pie was always my mother’s purview. And pie, my dear friends, is sacramental in our culture. You show up to my Aunt’s for Thanksgiving and you’ll count no less than half a dozen different pies. Cherry, Apple, Pumpkin, Mince, Chocolate, Pecan, Lemon Meringue. Plus a Banana Pudding thrown in for good measure. It’s a southern thing, we eat pie. 

I left pie baking to the professionals and focused on cake and brownies and cookies–oh, and out of this world truffles, which technically fall under candy, but you take my point. It wasn’t until my early married life that I decided I would not be intimidated by pastry. I would seize my unused pastry cutter and get on with it. I set out to perfect my crust making ability and well, that takes practice.

Poor IZ. For awhile he got a pie a week. Apple. Because I abhor Apple pie, and I figured if I made a pie I didn’t like, I wouldn’t eat it. That and we were dirt poor and apples were dirt cheap Over and over I made pie crust and I discovered it was darn easy and I was very good at it. Beautiful pie after beautiful pie was consumed, because it’s IZ’s culture to never let a pie go to waste. I like that about him

It was years before I realized I didn’t know squat about making pie crust. While I owned a copy of every book Martha Stewart had written at the time, I didn’t bother to crack one on my odysey of pie baking. There was no point. Everybody knows that you when you make pie crust dough, you use Crisco. Well, everybody in my world. It says so right there in my Vintage Better Homes and Garden’s Cookbook. 

(Although, I do have one Auntie who uses the pat-in-pan method which calls for oil. Her crust is, by  far, the best I’ve ever had.)

Years later, many many pies later, I would discover that the recipe page for pie crust in that very vintage cookbook had disappeared. If you ask me, Martha took it on one of her visits to my house. She denies that, however, suggesting it probably got lost in one of my many moves.  

Enter Martha and her butter based pie crust recipe.   It was omen. I grasped the opportunity to study as an acolyte at the shrine to Martha that was my kitchen. I mean, how hard could it be?

Apparently, butter is not Crisco. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t master Martha’s pie crust with any consistency.  In fact, each succeeding attempt just got worse. The crust never seemed to come together–either too lumpy and thick resembling short-bread or too thin and oily and refusing to actually be crust.  Tasty they might be, but beautiful they were not.  My pies, made with love and quickly consumed were ugly. I would serve them with a well-honed qualification, “It’s delicious but ugly.” And that’s how my pies ended up with the moniker “Butt Ugly Pies.” You see the pun right? Because my then 9 year old did and it stuck!

I’m pretty certain in all her years of baking, Martha never turned out a Butt Ugly Pie. I was a failure. I couldn’t make a pretty pie. Not even if Martha was sitting in her shrine, dressed in linen and well heeled shoes giving pointers. No amount of sprinkling ice water was just right, no method of measuring flour made me more competent, not even the best in pastry cutters could solve my problem. 

You’ll blame it on humidity or poor technique. My butter wasn’t cold enough, my flour wasn’t gourmet enough. But honestly, it’s because Martha is a Northerner. If she’d been born in the South, she’d be baking pie crust with Crisco and you wouldn’t be reading this.

So this 4th of July, I put a moratorium on Butt Ugly Pies. No more. I bought some butter flavored Crisco and made pie like all good southern girls do. I looked at IZ and flatly proclaimed, “I don’t really care about your arteries, my pie is going to be beautiful.”

And it was. 

 

 

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