Secrets of The Pie Lady -- 1st Installment

Welcome to "Secrets of the Pie Lady"--an ongoing series full of pie making tips for those of you who bake your own pies, and those of you who would like to learn.  I call them "secrets" because they are solutions to problems that I have figured out myself, when I could not find answers in any of my trusted cookbooks or elsewhere.  I am surely not the only person in the world to have thought of these things, but your favorite cookbook probably won't mention them. More pie folklore than pie science, they are solutions that have worked for me and maybe they will work for you. 

When it comes to making pies there really aren't any secret recipes or techniques.  For instance, open any cookbook and you will find that cup for cup, ounce for ounce, the ingredients for basic pie dough are all pretty much the same.  You will get different results by using shortening, versus butter, versus lard or oil; other variations may include adding sugar, egg, vinegar, or even baking powder.  But the basic proportion of fat, to flour, to water is about the same in every recipe.

The same goes for technique.  Every cookbook you refer to will offer its own detailed how-to instructions and pictures that go something like this--work the fat into the flour using finger tips, two knives, pastry blender, or food processor until it is evenly mixed in and the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal; add just enough ice water to moisten, and pat gently into a ball.  Cookbooks also provide answers for many pie dough questions like which kind of fat makes the flakiest dough, why pie dough becomes tough when it is overworked, and what happens when too much water is added. 

Even with so much information and so many recipes available to the home baker, pie making can be frustrating and disappointing.  Unexplained things often seem to go wrong, and after many years of making pies I have had my share.  But because I have baked hundreds and hundreds of them, I have also had plenty of opportunities to experiment with finding solutions.  Which leads me to the very first pie lady secret--bake lots of pies!  

Really!  Create a special pie making corner in your kitchen, collect baking tools that you enjoy looking at and keep them set up; a wooden or marble dough board, a rolling pin that feels just right, a beautiful mixing bowl.  Maybe you don't know what you need quite yet, but the point is that as you begin baking you will be so much more inclined to just "quick, mix up some pie dough" if you don't have to start by clearing a space on the counter, pulling out your mixing bowls from the back of the cupboard, locating your recipe somewhere in that box or drawer, and making a special trip to the grocery store to get flour.  If you are baking regularly you will be more likely to always have the ingredients you need on hand.

My home kitchen is not set up for baking any more, so for these very reasons I prefer baking at the pie shop.  All I have to do is put on my apron and start measuring ingredients.  People have often asked, especially when I was doing all the baking for the pie shop myself, how I could possibly bake "that many pies?"  The truth is when your kitchen is set up and you bake on a regular basis, it's a whole lot easier to bake a dozen pies than it is just one every six months or a year!  So, there's the first pie lady secret--have a pie making corner set up in your kitchen where you can put together a pie at a moment's notice.  That's how to coax yourself into making lots of pies; and baking lots of pies is how you get good at it!

-The Pie Lady

Cherry Pie, Please!

Here at the pie shop we bake cherry pies year round.  It's one of those pies people get a hankering for whatever the season and nothing else will do.  My grandmother always made cherry pies two or three at a time. One was for eating now; the others were for the pantry, to be enjoyed later in the week.  Sour cherries, also called tart or pie cherries are used to make traditional cherry pie.  They are a delicate fruit and have a very short growing season.  As you will learn, common as cherry pie might seem to be, these little fruits really are to be treasured.  

Depending on where they are grown, sour cherries may ripen up just in time to make the perfect Fourth of July pie.  Old fashioned homemakers, who want their families to enjoy cherry pie year round, pit the cherries and then either can or freeze them at home.  It is a labor of love to be sure.  Fortunately, good quality canned and frozen sour cherries are also available commercially, and both make delicious pies.  Neither of them resembles cherry pie you may have eaten made from gooey and gloppy commercial cherry pie filling, though; just the cherries please, we’ll make the filling ourselves if you know what I mean!  

Winter cherry pie as I call it, using canned cherries (packed in water), is made by draining the cherries and thickening the cherry juice on the stove with cornstarch and sugar.  The cherries are then added, the crust filled and the pie topped.  When I was growing up this was the perfect George Washington birthday pie.  We really did celebrate his birthday back then.  Pies made with frozen cherries are made just as you would use fresh cherries, except that somebody else has already, lovingly pitted them for you.  Just mix up the cherries with sugar, add tapioca for thickening, pile them into the bottom crust, and don't forget to dot with butter before you weave your lattice crust on top.

Anyway, getting back to the pie shop, as always our customers are asking for "cherry pie, please!"  And we have to say there won't be any more cherry pies till next year.  Not because we don't want to bake them, but because we can't get frozen sour cherries from our usual sources, or anywhere else. The sour cherry crop in Michigan was lost this year due to erratic weather and that is where almost all the cherries used for commercial canning and freezing are grown in our country.  It seems the trees started budding with the warm weather they had up there in March; then freezing weather came along later in the season and everything was lost.  It is a reminder of how tenuous our relationship with the weather is these days; of the tenuous relationship with weather that farmers have always had, and of how much we depend on them.   

It reminds me that cherry pie is not so ordinary after all, not just "ho-hum, another cherry pie."  Instead, just like I can't wait to see the first crocus peeking through the snow in the early spring, can't wait to hear the first sound of peepers, to smell the lilacs, and feel the warm sun after a long, cold winter, I can hardly wait to taste that first cherry pie next summer.  It reminds me of what James Beard wrote about gooseberry pie in his classic cookbook American Cookery--"Gooseberry pie is seldom found nowadays, but if you do find it, treasure it!"  I'll treasure that first bite for sure.

Now I know that nothing else will really do, but until next year's sour cherry crop comes in we have to have something that will get us through the winter and satisfy our longing for a pie that is tart, sweet, red and cheery.  So we'll be counting on cranberries here at the pie shop, and maybe even raspberries.  As always there will be Apple Cranberry, and maybe a revival of the traditional Apple Cranberry Raisin Pie.  I used to make a Cranberry Orange Tart with Walnuts--m-m-m-m that sounds pretty good, haven't made that in years.  How about an Apple Raspberry Pie or Raspberry Pear; or how about Cranberry Apple Raspberry Pear?  

I've even come across a vintage recipe for Mock Cherry Pie.  I guess there hasn't always been an overabundance of sour cherries like we are accustomed to nowadays.  Sure enough, that pie is made with cranberries, raisins, and a touch of almond extract, just like an old fashioned cherry pie.   We’ll get through the winter just fine.  In the spring there will be rhubarb and strawberries for yet another tart, sweet, cheery, red pie and before we know it, it’ll be sour cherry season again.  In the meantime, here’s hoping for the best weather ever and a bountiful crop next year; for ourselves, and for the farmers who grow these little gems for us.

-The Pie Lady

Mother and Son–A Brief History

My son Wil manages our family business–I'm in charge of the pies, but Wil is definitely in charge of the pie shop.  He's so passionate about it in fact, that you might think that  when I opened the Pie Kitchen in our home on Burd Street when Wil was ten years old, that he was probably the kind of kid who was in there inventing and creating with flour, sugar, butter, and eggs.  He was probably out there drumming up business with friends and neighbors trying to earn a little pocket money.

But that's not the way it was.  No, when Wil was a boy his idea of Mom's pie shop was that it was an endless source of homemade cookies (yes, I baked cookies back then too) and all he had to do was to reach into those cookie bins with his grimy hands and grab some--and some for his friends too!  And then there were those big bowls of apples, peeled and cut, measured out and sugared up, ready to put into crusts.  He'd reach in there too, grab a handful, and out the door he'd fly completely heedless of the fact that he had just thrown off the carefully measured ingredients for Mom's next pies.

On occasion I would entrust Wil (and his best friend Michael) with the task of delivering  a  pie to some neighbor or other.  For some reason that neither boy could explain at the time, these pies just might come back undelivered, crushed in a box and fit to be eaten only by two grubby ten year old boys.  Years later Wil seems to recollect at least one of those pies getting caught in the customer's swinging screen door...hard to imagine, but then again when you put two ten year old boys together there's no telling what might happen!

One of my most vivid memories is of Wil and Michael playing a little catch with a golf ball in the family kitchen.  While it's never a good idea to play ball in the house, this turned out to be an especially unfortunate game of catch when the ball landed--plop--right in the middle of a pie that was cooling on a rack, ready for a customer.  Oh, those boys thought it was hilarious!  And so do I...now!

The original Pie Kitchen was back through our garden, past the clothesline, and up the porch steps.  Sometimes a customer would arrive to pick up an ordered pie and there it would be on the porch with a cigar box waiting to receive  the money.  I had to run out on an errand, or pick up children, or something.  During those years I was a pie lady trying to do it all myself.  I always hoped that sometime along the way I would meet someone who would be a good business partner.  I wanted the business to grow but I didn't know how to do it.

Never did I dream that years later my son Wil would become that person.   I had long since closed the Pie Kitchen and moved to upstate New York when Wil came to me and said, "Mom, I really want to start up your business again--I know we can do it!"  So I taught him how to bake a pie, and with the help of on-going telephone calls he began baking and selling pies much like I had done in the beginning.  Meantime we turned Wil's small kitchen into an approved home bakery , and I began driving down every week to help bake for the farmer's market on Thursdays.  Within a few months Wil was eager to open a small bakeshop and was thrilled to show me the large (small?) empty building that he thought would be perfect.  I was frightened, but Wil wasn't.  "Mom," he said, "we have some momentum going,  people are thrilled to have your pies again.   Now is the time to jump in and find out if we can really  make this work.  So are you in...?"   Well, of course I was. 

Meantime our large (small?) empty building is bulging at the seams and buzzing with activity.  The smell of fresh baked pies (and cookies, and muffins) fills the air and drifts out the door into the parking lot, even as far as the high school football field down the street.   There is no longer a clothesline for customers to pass by, or a cigar box waiting to meet them;  ten year old boys are not allowed to run through the kitchen snitching cookies and apples.  But the pies are the same as they were back then, and it feels as homey as ever in the pie shop.  

Best of all, I got my wish.   Children do grow up, and thanks to Wil, we now have a growing family business.    I guess you could say that mother and son have both grown up--now we're    the "Pie Lady and Son!" 

– The Pie Lady