A Slice of Heaven

PIE EVERY DAY Recipes and Slices of Life

By Pat Willard

(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: 267 pp., $19.95)

*

I make the world’s best apple pie.

Food stylists and skilled pastry-makers would hoot at either the misshapen, juice-flooded finished object or the sight of me rolling out and patching the pastry--half the time I’ve slightly but critically underestimated the amount of ice water or handling necessary to make the dough hold together--then astigmatically trying to correct the lopsided edges of the crust. Still, it is the world’s best apple pie, and I’m even willing to divulge the first two steps of my infallible recipe:

1. Choose to live in part of the country where you can get firm, crisp, sprightly tasting, very juicy apples (such as Northern Spies, Winesaps or properly fresh Jonathans) from small local orchards in the interval between the last week or two of the regular baseball season and just before Thanksgiving.

2. Never make apple pie except during this period.

Step No. 2 ensures the pie-worthiness of the apples. It also gives me a chance to forget from one year to the next how terrible I am with pastry and what a pain it is to build up the filling slice by slice.

The title of Pat Willard’s “Pie Every Day” thus struck me as an idea of which I’d rather be on the receiving than the giving end. (My husband, who does not make pie, thought it a desirable and practical menu suggestion.)

After living for a few weeks with this book at my elbow, I can conclusively state that I’ll never take up pie-making every day, every week or even every month, but I’d be glad to spend time with Pat Willard any or every day.

If you are a hopeful baker seeking a systematic, comprehensive pie manual, search for a copy of Susan Purdy’s useful (though out-of-print) “As Easy as Pie” (Antheneum, 1984). Willard’s ideal audience is not manual users but people who consider pie the balm of the spirit and an anchor of meaning in a crazy world. I must have more in common with this party than I supposed, or I wouldn’t start looking each fall for the old blue-glazed pie plate my father gave me.

But I also think Willard is reminding us that good pies minister to much the same needs as good writing. “Pie Every Day” has its moments as a pie anthology, but it’s better read as the world’s first autobiography-in-pie.

Thumb around among chapters and headnotes and what you get is the life story of a young Philadelphia-born, nonconformist college dropout (actually, she was thrown out) who moved to the South to bang her head against a depressingly wrong job; left that to become a housing rights activist fighting city hall in Atlanta; went to Ravenna, Ohio, to marry a boyfriend working there as a newspaperman; helped finance his return to academe and the East Coast by writing restaurant reviews for a newsletter in Brooklyn; and survived the ghastlier phases of motherhood to achieve a messy, sometimes wearing 1990s equivalent of domestic serenity.

Where’s the pie? Not only does a whole pie or a useful slice of one materialize at every stage of this highly nonlinear story, it always carries some triumphantly convincing meaning: pie as hangover relief, marital blessing, bond among female war buddies, Desperation City kid-pacifier, companion in sleepless nights and never-failing expression of succor, friendship or hospitality.

When Willard leaves the community activist project to get married up north, and Miss Glover, the “small thin reed” of a woman who’s helped her learn the work, shows up on her last day with a coconut custard pie of which the two eat “every last crumb straight from the pan,” you want to cheer.

Pie as culinary accomplishment is not exactly slighted, but Willard sounds as if it wouldn’t mean much to her without the Miss Glovers of the world. The point of her title is that if people treated pie as good workaday fare, we could all do better by family, guests and ourselves.

She didn’t join the ranks of pie makers until shortly after her wedding. While working as a waitress in a Ravenna restaurant, she plucked up the courage to ask her colleagues Betty and Senia how the thing was done, on a general theory she summarizes as: My husband loves pies+I learn to make them equals we will be forever one.

Betty’s formula--a basic shortening or lard crust that leads off the crust chapter--is still one of Willard’s cherished standbys.

Most of the recipes are just as firmly rooted in memory or association. A lot are contributions from siblings or neighbors.

Nearly every one has the air of having been put down on paper because someone really loves it, whether it’s tarte Tatin, rhubarb pie, tiramisu re-imagined as a refrigerator pie or a Jell-O and Cool Whip combo in a store-bought crumb crust--part of a small array of concoctions designed “as legal mood-altering drugs” to be dispensed to kids when nothing but bona fide junk will do.

At length we learn the context of Willard’s obsession: The transformation from occasional pie maker to a Passionate Pilgrim of Pies took place when she was desperately trying to cope with a difficult second baby and had nowhere to retreat to but the kitchen:

“ ‘What are all these pie shells in here?’ my mom asked when, concerned about my mental health, she visited again.

“ ‘I’m practicing,’ I told her. I don’t think the sight of empty pie shells crowding out everything else on the refrigerator shelves assured her that I was sane, but she at least admitted I seemed less agitated than before.”

I had great fun cooking from this book, but only after recognizing some pitfalls. The first was trying to follow Willard’s directions for mixing pastry doughs in the food processor (I always do it by hand). I had to try both “Betty’s Pie Crust” and an all-butter pastry for savory tarts several times in order to get them to work at all, and even so they were horrendously fragile. (I did better with a hand-mixed pa^te brisee.) Obviously, it’s easy to go just a microsecond past the right stage without realizing it.

It was also a surprise to me that the sections on savory pies, tarts, empanadas and the like have some stretches of recipes much less vivid and varied than the dessert pie sections. Even I, usually a pushover for anything with enough butter, eggs and cream, found the savory tarts rather monotonously given over to these elements.

A chicken pot pie that I tried was nice but not remarkable, and the smoked salmon tart ended up somehow too rich and lemony to be a good showcase for the fish. (Another time I’d freely reinterpret it with whole eggs instead of yolks and a milk-cream combination instead of heavy cream.)

On the other hand, my dessert pie experiments turned out fine. Willard’s versions of the old-fashioned apple-custard dish called “Marlborough Pie” and the extravaganza of meringue, whipped cream and lemon (here lime) curd that used to be known as “Pinch Pie” or “Angel Pie” are lovely. I also enjoyed seeing cheesecake, something I often find tediously gooey, turned into a slightly less dense “cheesecake pie.”

For better or worse, “Pie Every Day” hasn’t had the degree of editorial smoothing-out that befalls cookbooks from the major cookbook publishers. The folks at Algonquin should be kicked for letting things like “Senia overheard Betty and I talking” slip through. They’ve also failed to get Willard’s recipes as tidily vetted as all users might prefer--where are most of us going to get “1 pound ground mutton” or “a small, shallow casserole dish,” of 4x2 inches?

But the truth is that making one’s way through highly individual pie recipes with the odd booby trap or two, compared with following flawlessly regularized pie scripts, is like having a conversation with another human being about a life-giving subject. That’s what books like this are for. Maybe I will reconsider my apple-pie schedule.