Today I am grateful for pie. Pie is my grandmother in South Carolina standing over apples in a skillet on the stove as we stumble into the kitchen for breakfast. Peach slices steaming with sugar and cinnamon while she stirs, wiping her hair back up off her forehead with the back of her hand. “See if there’s enough vanilla ice cream in the deep freeze for dinner” she says, as she gestures down the hall. There is always enough vanilla ice cream in the deep freeze for dinner, but she always has to make sure. Pie is two servings of field peas and mashed potatoes with gravy and green beans and corn bread and pot roast strips from last night’s supper – and then, a Pyrex dish pulled from the oven with checker cloth mitts and set on the eye of the stove; braids of dough shiny with baked butter, and fruit from the farmer’s stand peaking out in holes between the breading, and all around the edges, a scallop pattern, pressed with the straight end of a spoon. Pie is the sensation of hot sweet filling and cold, cold cream melting together on your tongue as they try to reconcile their differences on the way down to an expectant stomach. Never have I enjoyed such discord. Hot and cold, and sugar sweet syrup taming tangy Granny Smiths picked but a few days before. Pie is the blackberries my friend Kenneth gleaned all morning from the briars and bramble on his family farm; his mother folding them into a pastry shell hours before I come and setting them out on a counter so the aroma filled the little country house like perfume before I drove in to town. All that work and chiggers, too -- just for me. Pie is my sister learning how to bake, drawing meringue up into peaks with a wooden spoon like an artist painting the foam of the sea. Her first pie at supper, cut on the dining room table while we watched; a long sharp knife diving into the waves of topping, parting the yellow pudding earth below. Pie is all this work and time and mastery I never understood. Hours of cutting and baking and waiting and cooling: “Don’t cut it yet – let it set a bit longer so it will stay in one piece when you slice it.” I don’t want to wait but I do. Hours of preparation for one desert and one chance to serve it on small fancy plates. Pie is all this work and time and mastery I never understood. Until maybe now. **(I hope if you have a moment, you might read my post on freedom from yesterday because I learned a lot writing it - it sort of all just came out -- and thanks for reading! Laurie)
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 14:33:09 +0000
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