A tender year, plotting a life in pie

My story as told in a calendar of crust

Who knew pies were so emotionally evocative.

A lemon tart in February infuses damp, chilly days with a substitute sun. When done right, there’s nothing subtle about the intensely sweet/tart eggy curd that dances in my mouth and gooses winter-dulled senses. As far as I’m concerned, the crust is but a bit player in this winter production. Short crust or shortbread, it hardly matters. But do use Meyer lemons if you can find them. Their season is brief, coinciding with the worst weather in most of the country, but their floral fragrance adds depth to this perky class clown of a pastry.

A Paschal baklava is an honorable offering worthy of an emerging spring. Layers and layers of brittle, vellum-like phyllo pastry encase a paycheck’s worth of almonds, walnuts, and lavish quantities of creamy butter. The warmth of cinnamon comforts like toast yet kindles an eastern exoticism. Generously drenched in honey—that miraculous biblical nectar of thousands of industrious bees in service to their queen—and lightly scented with orange flower water, baklava is both an investment and a sacrament. Made to be shared freely with loved ones.

One year, early summer found me with an unexpected yet fortuitous glut of sour cherries. The harvest is fleeting and the rare fresh crop is available only to those with access to a venerable backyard tree or a connection at a local orchard. I had an “orchard guy.” Pitting fifteen pounds of the ruby, heart-shaped fruit with production-line efficiency left my kitchen looking like a horror flick. I raced to capture and hold the bounty in the basement freezer setting aside a couple of cups of fresh fruit, a reward for my effort, which mostly consisted of cleaning the kitchen. My appreciative husband and I celebrated our cherry bonanza with individual hand pies; a scant layer of candied almond paste deliciously countered the tart fruit with a nerdy horticultural wink toward the rest of the stone fruit family whose season was just getting under way.

Plump blushing peaches in July routinely lure me into an overheated summer kitchen. I quickly assemble a sturdy fluted, butter crust piled with a generous golden mound of coarsely wedged fruit, lightly sweetened and sparked with a generous squeeze of lemon to contrast the sticky ripe fruit. Simple is sufficient. Later, we retreat to the garden to escape a house now elevated to blast furnace temperatures by a 450 degree oven. Blissfully I bite into a slice of warm pastry and perfect peaches dolloped with loosely whipped cream cut with tangy Greek yogurt and scented with vanilla.

Late summer signals our annual assault on neighborhood blackberry brambles, that Pacific Northwest invader of open land, weed lots, and the occasional crack in the sidewalk. We brave aggressive yellow jackets, reaching between the heavily armored canes to pluck the perfumed fruit. Even buttery crust and a puddle of rapidly melting vanilla ice cream can’t tame the wild, almost wine-like flavor of the foraged fruit.

Fall approaches and bushels of apples begin to show up in farmers market as the days shorten and nights become chilly signaling both the crescendo and the end of the harvest season for most fruits in my corner of the world. Sweet and juicy, or spicy, tart, and tannic, the complex flavors of backyard or farmstead apples are a far cry from staid grocery store staples. Variety, abundance, and the affordability of the harvest begs to be transformed into tarts, turnovers, crisps, and other All-American favorites.

Which brings us to the holidays, a season that carries more than its fair share of familial crime scenes. Exhibit A: Christmas, 1970-something, I was 13.

Serving as kitchen assistant to my mother’s pastry artistry was a highlight of the year’s Christmas vacation, one of several court-decreed, alternate year holiday visits — itself an exercise in emotional time travel.

Our contribution to a boozy potluck feast with new neighbors was a pumpkin pie. Feast days are not complete without strange relatives but relative strangers add a volatile spark to an already combustible mix.

I mixed up the filling while she deftly handled the pastry, perfectly fluting the dough. Excited and distracted by my advancement in the kitchen, I neglected to add sugar to the canned pumpkin filling. An omission that wasn’t discovered until the close of the meal when I proudly presented and passed slices of “our” pie to four slightly soused adults and my brother… my constant witness.

Later, she claimed she knew all along. Only a 13-year-old can understand the mortification and embarrassment that ensued. Oh, the kindness of strangers as our host valiantly praised my effort, declaring himself diabetic (with an apparent dispensation for alcohol) who ordinarily would be denied desert. He proceeded to eat two pieces of my sad vegetable pie.

Pastry is powerful. Today, Christmas is reserved for the healing kiss of my grandmother’s Texas pecan pie. I offer prayers to the kitchen gods that this year my mixture of dark Karo syrup and brown sugar loaded with butter and eggs will gel into a silken sweet-salty foundation under a crown of toasty nuts.

My crust may not achieve glamour status, and yes, sometimes my filling is soupy, but Nana’s pecan pie never disappoints. No surprise. This from a woman who could always distract from painful subjects with a cheery “let’s talk about something good to eat!”