The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [212]
And then she began a hand motion that has became the basis of my own pie making. Reaching to the bottom of the bowl with both hands, Marion scooped up the flour and fat above the rim of the bowl and ran her thumbs over it, against her fingertips, from little finger to index finger. The small pieces of fat and flour slipped between her fingers and back into the bowl and the large pieces tumbled over her index fingers. She repeated this about twenty-five times, until the pieces of fat and flour ranged in size from very coarse meal to grains of rice to green peas to small olives. The irregularity is important, as is the presence of large pieces.
Marion added a half cup of refrigerator-cold water all at once, and stirred it in a spiral pattern with a dinner fork until little clumps began to form. (She recommends adding more water rather than less if you are unsure.) She squeezed together a small handful to see if the dough adhered to itself, which it did, then pressed all the dough firmly together on one side of the bottom of the bowl, split off about half of it with her hands, and immediately rolled it out. She used my huge and very heavy wooden rolling pin with ball-bearing handles, but her touch was light and quick.
Marion had broken nearly every rule of making piecrust. She should have used chilled shortening so that it would not melt into the flour. For the same reason, she should not have used her warm fingers. She should have added vinegar to make the crust more tender, and she should never have stirred in all the water at once, but by tablespoons and then by teaspoons. Consequently, she used much more water than was absolutely necessary and didn’t distribute it very well. And she didn’t chill the dough or even let it rest before rolling it out. Through the years, Marion had tried all of these safeguards and precautions, yet none seemed to matter much. So she had simplified.
And yet, what emerged from the oven was a perfect cherry pie, or at least a perfect crust—flaky, tender, and crisp. (Something had gone wrong with my filling, and it ran all over the place.) This was the piecrust I needed to master and understand—while Marion was still in New York City.
But a day later, for reasons always unfathomable to me, Marion left New York for northern California—before I was even close. The next two weeks were filled with telephone calls and faxes. Did she hold her hands exactly parallel to the table? Were her fingers curved or straight? Were they separated from each other or tightly closed? And most important, did she pass her thumb back and forth across her fingers each time she scooped up the shortening and flour, or just once? This last question was the subject of three phone calls.
It is Marion’s fingers that make the piecrust, not her brain. So every time I called with a question, she would hang up, make a pie or two, or just the crust, carefully observe what her fingers were doing, sometimes take notes, and report back. I held my fingers over the earpiece so that they could hear, too. She baked a dozen extra pies in all. Summer fruit in northern California was at its peak, and nothing went to waste—Marion’s friends often drop by, and twice her gardener was rewarded for working hard in the midst of a heat wave. Good piecrust is made by people with cool fingers and a warm heart, the adage says.
At long last, my own hot fingers had learned their lesson. I became proficient, and my crust was tender, flaky, and crisp. After a while, making the dough and rolling it out took only twelve minutes. I timed it. The whole process is much briefer than a trip to the supermarket.
I was committed to Marion’s method. But I wondered about Marion’s exceedingly generous attitude toward water and her practice of adding it all at once before stirring. She feels that a dry dough will break at the edges as you roll it. These splits can be repaired, but Marion finds that the dough never “bakes out” well.
I will admit to no one that I was