Peace, Love and Meat Pie

October is a month of unrelenting birthdays of which the second is today. Gladys is turning eight and is frothing with excitement about the joy and wonder of it all. I have, over the years, tried to balance the joy and wonder against reality, without destroying either, sometimes more successfully than others. Mercifully for me, Gladys has requested food I can really do, without trauma. She fixed upon cobbler, rather than cake, may the Lord be ever praised, and meat pie.

I won’t lie to you. I do a marvelous meat pie. It is a culinary delight of my own invention, and I could, of course, try to demure and cast my eyes elsewhere, rather than just plainly stating an obvious truth: my meat pie is delicious. Humility must be grounded in the afore mentioned reality. Nothing is gained by saying something untrue. I hope you’ll understand this break from my normal way of self deprecation.

The thing about a meat pie, and I know I’ve blogged about this elsewhere, but who knows where, that’s what I ask myself, is that the equal parts–crust and filling–must be firmly handled, not with fear, not with bashing and over confidence, but the way you handle an infant, confidently, assuredly, with love.

The filling is a simple matter of ground beef, and pork if you like, mushrooms, onions, garlic, tomato, married together with a gentle outpouring of wine. Sometimes I go wild and do carrots and green pepper and whatever I can find hiding in the back of the fridge.

But I want to turn my attention to the crust, most of all, because the children and I were consoling ourselves after a long day with an episode of Good Eats, the one where he makes an apple pie, and it turned out to be most distressing. I think, when you come to the matter of pie crust, you must really stop and consider what it is that you want. Do you want something really flakey? Do you want a crust as dry and tough as shoe leather? Do you think the main event of the pie is the filling? If you have said yes to any of these well then you won’t like what I am about to say.

The purpose of the pie, in my view, is the crust. Sure the filling should be luxurious and gorgeous and make you shed tears of regret over lost dreams, but it’s the crust that makes the pie, else why not just take a spoon and quietly eat the filling in the dark alone when no one is watching you? I’m sure you can feel how right I am. Without the crust, the pie is not itself.

And why, I ask you, would you want a really flakey crust that sloughs away in the wake of your sharp knife? Why even, really, would you want a crust that stands up half way to the ceiling so that the pie is Mostly filling? Wouldn’t you rather have equal measures of crust and whatever is inside?

And if that is so, then you must swallow down your hope of a hasty crust and put away your food processor. Just shove it to the back of your cupboard and let the dust accumulate. What you need is butter, and a fork, and your own fingers. Now, I always make a lot of pie. Why would you only want to make one pie? That seems short sighted, to me, so these proportions are for people who enjoy pie, and plan to eat more than one tiny morsel. If you are on a diet, well, I am very sorry for you. I trust there is a blog for that somewhere.

I do five cups of flour and four sticks of butter, unsalted, with a tablespoon of salt into the flour before I really get going. The butter should be cold, but don’t kill your self over it. I cut all the butter into thin slabs and fork it into the dough for a long time and then crumble it the rest of the way by hand. Crumble is not perhaps the best word. You want all the butter covered in flour, but if some of the butter remains in largish chunks, that is not your undoing. The uneven blending of flour with butter is part of what makes the crust so delicious. Then, when you feel like there’s no more you can do, you gently add ice water, forming the dough gently by hand, until it has properly come together. Then stop. Don’t keep going. Cover it and let it recover in the fridge. Now, I know in this time of making everything fancier than it ever has before, that the mention of alcohol rather than water hovered in the air of that Good Eats episode. Normally this would be obvious, water is boring. And gluten is bad. Except that not all gluten is bad. You don’t want a complete absence of gluten in your pie crust. You want it to adhere to itself, be delicate and fragrant, but not flake away into nothing. Water is perfectly acceptable. I commend it as a good choice.

If you are doing a meat pie, make sure your filling is cool so that the crust doesn’t melt completely. If you are a doing an apple pie, for heaven’s sake, don’t cut your apples so very big. Cut them very thin, very fine, and don’t muck them up with jellies and tapioca. Just a little butter, a little sugar, a sprinkling of cinnamon. When you roll your dough, don’t fuss and worry about too much flour. Firm and gentle, not an agony of fuss and anxiety. The more pie you make, the more deft you will become, handling the vagaries of various levels of humidity and temperature. It’s worth doing it over and over again to get it really right.

I bake all my pies at 350, in the middle of the oven, not moving them up and down and turning them and shifting them. And who can wait four whole hours to eat a pie. Holier and better people than I. I only wait until I can touch it and then launch in.

It may be that I will film myself doing up this pie this morning, and fling it onto the Internet, in case you feel I have been unclear. In these times to difficulty and violence, of micro and macro aggressions, if we cannot come together over religion or anything, perhaps we could gather around a pie, even just our own individual pies, and eat them in hope for peace and prosperity for all.