It never rains, but it pears

I've been sidetracked from apples this month as I've come across a source for free pears. Four pies and one tart later, I'm about to ready to move on to the six varieties of apple I've been hoarding. So before we get back to our first love, here's the pear round up.

1. Pear Tart: I used a basic pear tart recipe from Great Pies & Tarts by Carole Walter. It was quite nice, although I'm not such a huge fan of the apricot jam glaze. Apricot always just tastes strange to me. The crust recipe came from the same book - it turned out well, although it took forever to make; it involved all kinds of hand massaging of butter bits and swirling ingredients gently in a clockwise direction.

2. Two different Pear Sour Cream Pies: on the left, you'll see a pear sour cream pie based on Aunt Ruby Alice's sour cream strawberry pie recipe (see earlier post). On the left is a pie based on the apple sour cream pie recipe in The Joy of Cooking. Ruby Alice's involves mixing dry ingredients into sour cream and applying to the top. The final result is lovely and thick and creamy, and has a sugary crust on top. For the other one, I added some cinnamon and sugar to the pears, and then just dumped sour cream on top. It was nice when warm, but man, I had a leftover piece that came straight out of the fridge, and it was foul. It probably didn't help that I used low fat sour cream. Bleh. Oh, and I'm still having problems under cooking fruit pies, so the pears were a tad crunchy, which didn't help.

3. Pear raspberry pies: One out of the oven, one still in. I had a bunch of pears left and wanted to use them up, so I tossed them with sugar and frozen raspberries, and covered them with a crumb topping. I didn't chill the dough enough though, so the crust cooked very quickly and I took the first one out sooner than I would have liked. I'm hoping that because the pears are riper than the last bunch, they won't need as much cooking.

Coming soon: Pies I ate this summer, Various apple pies, The Piebrary goes international, and a surprise mystery pie of such strange and shocking flavor that you won't believe it and which I'll probably only make once.

Friends of Pie

Kathy and Sara have earned the official designation of Friend of Pie. Not only did they let me stay with them after Helen's party, they made me waffles, gave me a tour of the finest container garden in the greater D.C. area AND had plenty of good pie and tart insights. I came away with some great new pie and cookie recipes, as well as a tart pan. I made my first ever tart pan this weekend, using summer veggies, including zucchini, sweet onions and mushrooms, with goat cheese and basil for extra flavor. I used my cuisinart to slice the onions and zucchini super thin. The edge of the crust got a little toasty in parts because I foolishly decided that I didn't really need to cover it with foil when I put the tart under the broiler. Fortunately it still tastes quite nice. Now that I have both pie pans and a tart pan, I may never eat anything non-pie-like ever again.

Helen's Strawberry Birthday Pie

Since 75% of my blog readership knows our dear Helen, I don't feel that I need to spend any time explaining why she is most deserving of birthday pie. If for some reason you are unconvinced of this fact, let me know and I will provide you with a complete list of reasons for your edification.

After several test pies, I ended up making a strawberry pie consisting of a baked shortbread cookie crust, filled with uncooked berries covered in a fruity glaze. The shortbread crust won out over regular crust in taste-testing. Early prototypes of the pie also had way too much glaze, so I tried to use as little as possible in the final pie. Despite riding to D.C. under heavy air-conditioning, the pies looked a little worse for the wear, but seemed to taste okay. Next year's birthday pies will surely be even better. Happy Birthday Helen!

Ruby Alice's Strawberry Sour Cream

I had to clean out the fridge a bit last night to make way for the lovely strawberries that I am picking up from my CSA tonight. One of the things that had to be used was a previous round of strawberries that was on its last legs. There were not quite enough berries for an all-strawberry pie, and what was left definitely had to be cooked, so I used it as an excuse to try a strawberry sour cream pie recipe that I got recently from my cousins Bob and Janet. The recipe comes from Bob's mother, Ruby Alice. I haven't cut into the pie yet, but the smell is incredible - Ruby Alice obviously knew how to bake. I do love a sour cream pie. Apple sour cream was my favorite for a while, but now I'm seeing that I'm going to have to do more with berries. And just wait till fresh peach season!

Experiments in Strawberry

I've been pondering the various elements of Helen's strawberry birthday pie. I got to tinkering in the pie lab last night with somewhat mixed results. First of all, I have to admit to a rookie mistake. It's terribly embarrassing, but I feel compelled to confess. I wanted to experiment with combining strawberries and a graham cracker crust. I also wanted to play around with a cooked strawberry pie (as opposed to glazed, uncooked berries). But it wasn't until I got the frankenberry pie in the oven that I thought "hmmmm, one generally uses graham cracker crusts for icebox pies, not baked pies." So yes, I scorched the edges of the crust. Badly. Very very badly. So badly that I couldn't bring it into work in it's pie form, despite the fact that people in our building will eat anything. This is also why you're viewing the pie in extreme close-up, sans edges. The good news is that the rest of the pie was totally edible, and in fact the bottom of the crust was quite lovely. For the filling, I used a recipe from Ken Haedrich's cookbook Pie that called for some manner of mint flavoring as well as lemon juice and nutmeg to flavor the pie. After calling Susan from the grocery store to ascertain that peppermint extract was probably the same thing as mint oil, that's what I went with. I was pleasantly surprised by the filling - it was much less jammy than I thought that a cooked, all-strawberry pie would be. The berries held their shape somewhat, and the crumb topping that I put on top was a nice addition. Scooped out from the burnt parts, it came out rather like a strawberry crisp. Still, there was a lot going on with this pie - cinnamon in topping and crust, nutmeg and mint in filling.....when re-heated it smelled a little bit like potpourri. It had a strange aftertaste too - I think that might have been the mint. I'm currently thinking that mint is not going to make it until the final pie, unless there is a groundswell of popular support for it. I liked the different elements of this pie very well, but it was very much a practice pie. In trying out different recipes, I didn't really consider the pie as a whole, which in terms of edibility is an issue. Still, it can't be that bad, since I'm eating some as I type. Although I do get queasy every time I think about finishing the whole thing on my own. Perhaps I can freeze some of it....

The Great Pie Exchange of '08 - part 1

I have a new favorite pie. Jeff and I agreed to swap pies recently. I’m to make him a spinach pie, and last week he gave me his famous rhubarb custard pie in exchange. Wow. Rhubarb custard pie gets everything right that strawberry rhubarb gets wrong. The flavors complement each other beautifully, without getting too lost or intertwined. It’s tart, sweet, and creamy all at once. Totally amazing. Fortunately, Kori was visiting when it arrived at the house, or I would have eaten the whole pie by myself in a matter of days. It had this magical quality whereby you would eat one piece, and immediately need a second. But once you ate the second piece, you only felt as full as if you had one piece, so you didn’t feel like a total glutton. Kori and I spent a lot of time debating just what Jeff’s crust secret is; her thought is that it reminds her of the crust of her great-grandma’s fried apple pie so we came up with all these theories about how Jeff could have fried the lattice top and then magically applied it to the pie. I ran some of these suppositions by Jeff this morning to see if I could get a reaction that would tell me we were on the right path, but he just smiled and declined to comment. I’m going to have to spend some time in the pie lab trying to figure this out.

Presidential Pie

While poking about on the history of Hoosier pie, I came across a great historical newspaper editorial about President Benjamin Harrison and pie that I had to share. I’ve transcribed it below with some very minimal annotation. The article mentions Hoosier pie, but I suspect here that the author is not specifically referring to a sugar cream pie, now known as a Hoosier pie, but is talking about Indiana pies in general. See what you think. Harrison’s relationship with pie was apparently life long. His obituary in the New York Times of 14 Nov. 1901 tells that while he lay dying, his young daughter from a second marriage brought him an apple pie that she had made. The former president smiled his recognition, but could not speak. He died not long after.

Milwaukee Sunday Sentinel, 27 Oct. 1889
Raising a Pie Issue

We doubt if that Democratic newspaper in New York which is interviewing a discharged Whitehouse cook can make any large amount of political capital out of the charge that the president and Mr. Halford[i] eat pie for breakfast. Most people in this happy land will ask with Emerson, “what else is pie for?”[ii] The notion that pie is something to be avoided, that it provokes dyspepsia, has been urged with assiduity for thirty years, yet pie continues to be the most popular of all the products of the bakery. It is worthy of note that pie is the horror, real or pretended, of those who have foisted on society those modern pastries that have done more to derange the human stomach and starve the human body than even hot mince pie. It was a proper distinction that was drawn by the Western man who, when asked what pastry he would have, replied: “I don’t want any pastry – gi’me some pie!” Pie is important enough and good enough to hold a place of its own without being classed under those modern abominations that are served under French names as food for human beings.

We are glad to observe that a reaction has set in against fancy desserts and in favor of pie, and we owe something to Mrs. Harrison[iii] for a noble example. When Gen. Harrison entered the Whitehouse, some anti-pie person persuaded him that it would not do to eat the plain and wholesome cookery of Indiana, including pie. Pie, he was told, was not only injurious, but was under a social ban. What was the result? “The new cook’s dishes laid him out.” He neglected pie for the croquettes, soufflés and other atrocities of the anti-pie element, and fell into the sharp clutches of dyspepsia. ‘Lige Halford, also, succumbed. Then Mrs. Harrison asserted herself. She fired the two French cooks and sent back to Indiana for her old negro cook,[iv] whose picturesque bandana now brightens the kitchen where the white cap of a gesticulating Frenchman recently bent over pylorus-vexing dishes. No more perfidious soufflés and croquettes for the president. He can have corn-beef boiled with cabbage, turnips and potatoes if he wants it; potatoes with the skins on, salt rising bread, corn-pone, hominy, baked apples, apple-dumplings and pie – good old-fashioned Hoosier pie, about which there is no fraud, and which makes a man feel that, whatever trials beset his path, life is still richly worth living. We look to see an improvement in the administration of national affairs, now that the president’s internal affairs are arranged.

If the Democratic party wants to switch off from the tariff issue and raise a pie issue for the next campaign, all right. If that party chooses to make war on pie and become a party of white-cap French cooks, well and good. This country will vote for pie every time.

[i] Elijah Walker Halford was Harrison’s aide/secretary (The Presidents: A Reference History [2002], 300).
[ii] This anecdote seems to originate in James Bradley Thayer’s A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson (1884) which recounts an 1871 journey Thayer made with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
[iii] Caroline Lavinia Scott Harrison was Benjamin Harrison’s first wife.
[iv] Dolly Johnson was the cook that the Harrisons brought to the White House from Indiana to replace the French chef.