A Commonplace Book of Pie (2 page)

 

All peach pie-lovers are men, if only on the inside. I met a peach pie-lover from Seattle once. She said that adding cayenne to cinnamon and consuming it in a peach pie will make you grow hair on your palms. Some people are scared to love peach pie for this very reason. Those who aren't afraid join a long line of people who know that there is nothing more delicious than loving what you fear. Even if desire makes you undesirable. Even if it grows a beard on your high five.

 

 

If vanilla cream pie is your favorite, you probably also like horses, getting lost in your hometown, abandoned houses, farmers markets, insensible shoes, and double-tall lattes with a splash of, well, you know.

 

 

Apple pie invented itself on the outskirts of what would become Hoboken, New Jersey on the afternoon of August 5, 1717. The apple orchards, too, were accidental, carried afar in the bellies of birds and bears and other four-legged fruit-eating animals, the seeds polished and shined by the intestines of their hosts and planted in spoor on new ground. When apple trees began to blossom among the inedible deciduous woods, settlers raced to cut the alders and underbrush away so the apples could have the full portion of sunlight they hoped their God owed them.

Back then, apple trees did not fruit every year. The settlers blamed themselves for this: in their greed, they had picked the first apple trees to near death. That the trees chose to hibernate every other year seemed an act of self preservation. The settlers resolved to be patient.

1717 was an off year, so a farm wife named Nancy Cottonwood retrieved a basket of apples stored in her cellar from the previous harvest. In the cool darkness the apples had kept remarkably well, but were no longer attractive. To appease their vanity, she cut them up. To honor their barren parents, she removed the tough core and seeds. And because it was the day before Sunday, her day of rest, she made pastry instead of slow-rising brown bread, wrapped the apples so they would not get cold, and baked them in her wood-burning oven. When William Cottonwood returned from the fields, he smelled his dinner on the windowsill and said, “Wife, give me a kiss. Food without hospitality is medicine.” It was a proverb he had heard in the tavern in town, where apple cider ran cleaner than water from any well in this would-be virgin world his people had claimed by calling it
new.

 

 

In plum country, landlords own houses but not the trees that twist their yards into piles of light breakfast. Their leases include flecked black canning pots as wide and deep as stoves; the last page grants harvest rights to Renter if she recruits her own crows to pick the fallen clean. She has grown out of her father's house but not his dinner dictums, so
Take all you want but eat all you take
turns April's greed of blossoms into August's tyranny of plums. Her fingers are blued by Italian prunes she rushes into jam and suspends in honey before the fruit can wrinkle into rot. She'll sweeten bread with her labor all winter, and vote for a mayor who believes plum pie is a currency that should be traded, never sold, especially between the treed and treeless.

 

 

You dare not trust yourself to make the house pleasant with your wit and so you buy ice cream. Hello cranberry pie-lover. Your lights are light because your darks are dark, bog-like, ballooned. Where your rivers break into lakes, weeds silk the dark water. Do you wonder how it feels to back-float in a cranberry field, cerise fruit bubbling up your arms' lazy windmill? What would cranberries sound like, their million submerged collisions? Like a tub of loose beads? A handful of lost change chattering in the dirt? The bite of tart fruit loses its teeth
a la mode
—but why speak of it? You're too adult to chew open mouthed, yet this pie is more vivid under the light of a loose jaw, a little air.

 

 

A marriage of convenience that lucked into love. I'd like to meet you on your wedding day, poured into a delicate dress and shaking with the weight of the unknown. I want to see the strange face of your groom lit with conjugal dread, the purse of his lips as he leans in to learn how to kiss, the yield and stop of your painted mouth, so careful. You each held mouthfuls of pearls. I want to watch the moment your dread met his. How the first clutch of feeling transformed into fear and you began to understand that fear is a scout for your soul's journey toward what it truly wants. You faced the crowd for the first time together, hand in hand, and walked into the sum of your new life, a new name to bind you.

 

 

The woman who serves rhubarb custard pie is queen of the tealit dining room, her whisperclean countertops formica bright. Though she has been known to fake orgasms, she would never serve Splenda to guests. Her smile can stretch criticism into compliments and put a man in the wrong for being born without dimples. She knows rhubarb is a vegetable but lets it pretend otherwise. Doesn't mind when the Washington State Rhubarb Coalition cross-dresses it in custard and plates it quivering pale, lukewarm to the fork. Of the forgivenesses available for use by the average human, hers is the kind that would rather be wrong than rude.

 

 

Often overlooked in favor of lemon meringue, Shaker lemon pie is not a housewife's treat so much as a grandmother's indulgence. The recipe is as easy to remember as a cliché: slice two lemons paper thin, macerate in two cups sugar overnight, beat four eggs and gently stir into lemon-sugar, add filling to crust, bake, bam. The sort of recipe that finds a flat surface in the brain and settles for life. Those who prefer Shaker lemon pie above all other pies get immense satisfaction from organizing pantries, cleaning closets, gathering earthquake kits, proselytizing the importance of being prepared. When the big one hits, the Shaker lemon pie-lover knows that the difference between safety and panic will be a quart of filtered water, a chocolate bar, a pack of smokes, a deck of cards, a companion to hug on the floor.