The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [208]
I had spent weeks reading all the scientific piecrust literature published since 1921 and every recipe I could find, about two hundred in all. My aim was to reinvent American piecrust from the ground up, taking nothing at face value—neither folk techniques, old wives’ tales, or instructions purportedly based on science. And after a long string of near misses (which is why I was eating only the apple filling), I had finally, this evening, figured out a novel, modern way of making the perfect, foolproof American piecrust. It was now browning happily in my oven.
I was under colossal pressure. Marion Cunningham, daunting pie expert and a friend for many years, was coming to town! Beautiful at seventy-three, with a golden gray ponytail and sky-blue eyes, Marion lives in Walnut Creek in northern California. She is mentor to probably half the bakers in America, through her authorship of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook (thirteenth edition), her indispensable Fannie Farmer Baking Book, her very successful The Breakfast Book (all published by Knopf), and countless magazine and newspaper columns. Marion is the first person I call with questions about American baking. Her patient explanations are usually interrupted by three or four pleas for help on the other line.
Marion is a calmly fanatical believer in simplicity, so I had kept my complex piecrust experiments to myself. When she arrived, I wanted to stun her with a method completely at odds with her own and demonstrate that Walnut Creek rusticity has its limits.
The objective is this: Perfect American piecrust must be seven things at once—flaky, airy, light, tender, crisp, well browned, and good tasting. The tricky ones are flaky, tender, and crisp—because these are independent virtues. Getting flaky, tender, and crisp to happen at the same time in the same pie seems nearly impossible. Yet millions of American women and men in the early 1900s could do it in their sleep, and probably tens of thousands can today. Marion is one of them.
French tart pastry is tender, buttery, and slightly crisp but possesses a compact, sandy texture instead of flaky layers. That’s fine for the French, but completely wrong for an American piecrust. In this, I think, we are unique among nations. When Jane Austen wrote, “Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness,” she didn’t say, “Flaky, tender, and crisp apple pies.” She meant some British predecessor of flaky, tender, and crisp—probably their adaptation of French puff pastry.
Savory pies were invented by the ancient Greeks and imitated by the Romans, who brought pie to Gaul. Years passed. The medieval French were great pie lovers—always meat pies, never fresh fruit—and the Normans took pie along when they conquered Britain in 1066. Huge pies—such as the one containing four and twenty blackbirds—were made with strong, thick crusts (neither tender, crisp, nor flaky) and were used more as containers for cooking and storage. It seems incredible that nobody in the world thought of putting fresh fruit into a piecrust until the English and French did in the early sixteenth century, but there it is. Fruit pie made its first appearance in English literature in 1590 in this seductive line from Robert Greene’s Arcadia: “Thy breath is like the steame of apple-pyes.”
The Pilgrims brought pie recipes and rolling pins on the Mayflower, along with apple-tree cuttings. Neither the apple nor most other fruit trees are native to America, and pies of wild berries (the edible varieties were pointed out by the Indians) were the most common in the early years of settlement. Both pie and apples bloomed here like nowhere else in the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson, when questioned about the New England habit of eating pie for breakfast, replied, “What [else] is pie for?” By 1900, in Midwest farming areas, pie was obligatory at least twice a day. And only thirty years ago, pie was America’s favorite restaurant dessert, requested by 60 percent of all customers at every meal.
Most piecrust recipes in the first American