Love and Cooking

My paternal grandmother Alice has been dead for nine years now and her household was dissolved long before that. Imagine my surprise when my mother told me and my SIL that she had some deep dish Pyrex pie plates that were Alice's, and wanted to give them to us.



These are actually hard to find these days. I got three and already had one back from when they were commonly sold, so a pie-baking pal of mine will be giving one a good home.

My grandmother was quite a pie baker, and I still regard her Thanksgiving pumpkin pies as the gold standard, against which other pies should be judged. Given the passage of time, and indeed the timing (I got the dishes on the ninth anniversary of her death), I have to take this as a Message from Beyond:

MAKE MORE PIE.

I only hope that Alice provides the Method with the Message.

I still had the apples I had been intending to make into applesauce to eat with latkes, so decided to try my hand at apple pie, using a pastry recipe that I had moderate success with in the past (after Russ Parson's from How to Read a French Fry - 1 1/4 cup flour, 4 oz butter flavor Crisco, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/8 tea baking soda plus ice water to mix per crust) and trying the food processor.

Unfortunately I left the pastry in the fridge for two days and it overdried. I did manage to get the top crust on by wetting it down before rolling but, while it was most excellently flaky, the pie looked like the dog's breakfast due to all the patching.

It has tasted all right, though. I put ginger in with the sugar (too much, and had to fish some out, but it baked up Just Right), which my grandmother probably would not have done. I obviously need more practice, and just as obviously need to get a lot more physically active Real Soon Now.