Pie and milk -- memories are made of this

I love pie with fruit in it -- just fruit.  No lemon meringue, thank you.  No chocolate, no custards (except pumpkin).  No pies where sugar is the main ingredient in the filling, like chess or pecan.

But give me an apple or cherry or peach pie and I'm a happy camper.  Even better than that first slice is the next day when you have leftover pie for breakfast.  And then, since breakfast is supposed to have healthy foods, the best way to eat the pie is in a bowl with milk, with a spoon.

When I worked downtown, across the street was an old-fashioned cafeteria, in the same place since the Depression, staffed with the same old ladies since the Depression, serving old-fashioned food.  Their pies were legendary, and whenever anybody in our department had a birthday, somebody would go over to the cafeteria at lunchtime and get a pie.  Then at 4 pm we'd take a break and have birthday pie.  The birthday child would get to take the rest of the pie home.

One year on my birthday I got stuck on a conference call that would not end.  Outside my office I could see people bustling around setting up plates and forks, obviously ready for the party.  As was I, but I couldn't get off the phone.  A bit after five everybody else gave up and went home.  When I finally hung up at 6:15 there was an entire cherry pie on the counter outside my office with "happy birthday" written on the box.

What a wonderful birthday present.  And I didn't even have to share.

Pie experiments

At Thanksgiving I wrote about augmenting my mincemeat pie with some apples, both to make the jar of mincemeat go farther and to cut its rich sweetness a bit.  One of my faithful readers, Sandy Ciolino, suggested that cranberries might serve the same purpose.

That sounded good to me, since I love tart foods and also since I had bought some cranberries that had never been used at Thanksgiving.  So the Christmas mincemeat pie had a layer of cranberries on the bottom.

The experiment was not an unqualified success.  A few people (but not my husband) thought too tart.  I used about two-thirds of a bag of cranberries (that would be about eight ounces, now that they have shrunk the package) and I think in the future I'd cut that to five or six ounces.

But the pie had a beautiful hint of red at the bottom and we're eating it with great relish, even through slightly puckered lips.

The pumpkin pie, on the other hand, was an unqualified success and disappeared very shortly afterwards.

The pie dilemma

One of my pet peeves with the food industry is that too often you are forced to buy two different items that don't match up.  For instance, hot dogs come eight to a package; hot dog buns come ten to a bag.

The same is true with thanksgiving pies.

They've done a pretty good job of getting a can of pumpkin to fill a standard pie plate, but a damn lousy job with mincemeat.

Yes, I'm a lover of mincemeat, even though conventional wisdom holds that nobody likes the stuff any more.  (I also love fruitcake, despite its identical reputation.)  But mincemeat has to be procured commercially, either in a big jar or in a tiny little package that you reconstitute with some boiling water.  I haven't seen one of those little packages in a decade, so now I buy the big jar.

The only problem: it only fills somewhere between a half and two-thirds of a pie plate.  My usual remedy is to cut up a couple of apples and put them in the bottom of the pie.  Not only does it eke out the innards to better fill the crust, it cuts the richness of the mincemeat a bit.

This Thanksgiving I did the usual routine: piecrust on the bottom, a layer of apples, then the jar of mincemeat.  And it was still looking pretty skimpy.  In fact, the piecrust extended a good two inches beyond the filling.  If I added the top crust as you always do, I'd either have a huge empty cavity inside the pie, or a crimped edge of crust two inches wide, or a boatload of leftover crust cut off to make everything fit right.

I made a radical decision -- no top crust!  I folded the extra crust over the edges of the mincemeat and stuck it in the oven.  To my delight, the filling didn't bubble up and escape over the top of the crust, but stayed where it belonged.  And there was plenty of crust per filling.

Next time, I may do this again.  Or I'll put in four apples instead of two.

Mincemeat

Some people like sausage, some like scrapple, those often delicious, often intimidating mixtures of unidentifiable ingredients where you're probably better off not knowing exactly what you're eating.  I love mincemeat, which in England just means (hamburger) but in the US means a sweet melange that is most often found in pies.

When I was a kid I remember mince pie as standard fare (i.e. you could buy it at the store if you didn't feel like baking) although maybe my memory is wrong.  Today it seems to be an exotic relic prepared and eaten only by aficionados.  Of which I am one.

I hadn't baked a mince pie in many years for one reason or another -- too rich, too many desserts on the menu already, people wanted pumpkin, etc.  But as I was taking requests for Thanksgiving dinner my son mentioned mince pie and that seemed like a wonderful idea.  My husband, who loves to poke around in the back of cupboards and remind me of all the goodies I bought ten years ago and haven't served yet, found not one but two little boxes of mincemeat and delivered them with a flourish.  "These are probably so old we can't eat them any more," he announced, in terms that were guaranteed to make me take up the challenge.

So how old were they?  I don't know.  They looked a little beat-up, as might be expected from having been in the back of the cupboard for a decade.  They didn't use the nutritional labeling format we're familiar with now, so several years at the very least.  I know they were less than 18 years old, because the label said copyright 1992.   But I thought mincemeat is probably similar to fruitcake (which I also love) in that its mystery ingredients probably include some industrial-strength preservative.  I forged ahead. 



The Thanksgiving pie was wonderful, and nobody died from old age or botulism, so yesterday I pulled out the second box of mincemeat and made another pie for Christmas.

If you didn't love mincemeat in advance, you would never proceed past the opened box (much like the old story marveling about the first person to eat an oyster).  It reveals a cellophane-wrapped brick of dark brown composite that smells glorious but resists arrest. 

I don't recall the texture of a fresh box of mincemeat, but the texture of my box was dense and a bit sticky.  The package said to "finely crumble" the stuff but I used a fork and plenty of elbow grease to break it into bits, then added water and brought it to a boil.

You could make a pie with just mincemeat (although that would require more than the single package I had left) but I have always added apples to cut the richness just a bit.  This pie required two big apples to fill it snugly.  I didn't bother mixing, just layered the apples and mincemeat.

Now comes the part where I channel my grandmothers -- the official way to trim piecrusts is to heft the pie in your left hand and wield the knife with your right, cutting downward as you twirl the pie around.  Yesterday I opted to seal the crusts by pressing them together with the tines of a fork, but meanwhile I was watching the movie of my grandmother pinching the crust into raised zigzags with her elegant fingertips.  And finally you must cut a flowing tree shape into the top crust so the steam, and a bit of juice, can escape.

I had a tiny sliver of pie last night, which along with the sliver I ate at Thanksgiving constitute the only desserts I have eaten in almost two years.  They were both worth the wait!!

Merry Christmas to everyone -- may your goose be fat, your pudding full of plums and your mincemeat pies delicious, now and in the new year.