30 September 2010

Tongues of Flame shell beans, Cabbage, Carrots, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Ancho hot pepper, Nicola potatoes, Sage, Tomatoes, Acorn and Carnival winter squash

What is a pie? This is not merely an academic question. With the pie contest only a few days away, you have surely spent some time contemplating this very issue while choosing exactly what to enter in competition. You could stick with the obvious sorts of pies—fruit and sugar and maybe a little spice backed in a crust. There’s nothing wrong with that. The most basic berry pie, well executed, is one of the great foods of the world.

And apparently one of the hardest to make given how many awful berries pies there are on the loose. The blame for this tragic situation lies mostly with commercial pie makers. I cannot absolve home bakers entirely. It is certainly possible to make terrible pie at home. The vast majority of bad pies, however, are made not in homes but in commercial kitchens, and made not with taste but cost in mind. With as little cost as possible, to be more precise.

There are many ways to make pie cheaply—to stint on the quality of the ingredients or take shortcuts to reduce the time needed—and just about every one of them is also a way to make pie badly. The average commercial fruit pie has a pasty, insipid crust made with nasty shortening and a glutinous filling that tastes of little more than corn syrup and thickener. You might not notice if they skipped the fruit—if in fact that is fruit in there and not some sort fruit substitute composed largely of paper manufacturing byproducts.

We have to take some responsibility for this sorry state of affairs because we keep buying these pies. Presumably if we refused to have anything to do with them nobody would make them. But as with so much of what we eat these days, we put up with bad commercial pies because they don’t cost much and someone else did the work. I think we must also have started to forget what real pie tastes like even as we cling to a nostalgic fondness for it, and so we keep buying pies the quality of which we are no longer equipped to assess accurately.

Of course, our pie nostalgia is precisely a longing for homemade food. It’s a nostalgia for moms in aprons rolling out dough on the kitchen table, a nostalgia for picking sweet berries on a perfect summer day, a nostalgia for the aroma of baking pies wafting from the oven, a nostalgia for families gathered at the table finishing a good meal with a slice of fresh pie. Even a good commercial pie, if such a thing exists, cannot possibly satisfy us the way a proper one does.

To be honest, I doubt even an excellent homemade pie could fulfill that sort of longing. We are not going to make the modern world, with all its hurry and alienation and commercialization and complication, disappear simply by working a bit of fat into a nice pile of flour with our fingertips, or rolling out a silky disk of pale dough, or cutting the peel from a crisp apple in one long aromatic curl, or smelling the oozing fruit juice caramelizing onto the bottom of the oven, or watching the motley brown crust shatter beneath the fork.

So what. We would probably find we do not like that lost world as much as we think anyway, and at least if you make a pie have a pie. You can take pleasure in a good homemade pie no matter what has happened to life.

Whatever a pie is. It could be the classic apple version, but it could also be a quiche with a layer of caramelized onions under the cheesy custard filling or a savory winter squash pie with sage and paprika or a chicken pot pie with tender cubes of potato and carrot and little kick from diced ancho or a tomato and onion pie with parmesan and garlic and lots of black pepper or a ground beef and cabbage pie or, well, just about anything you think would taste good baked in a crust. Maybe even shell beans (those red and white pods, which you want to split open to get at the speckled beans within, which can be boiled about half an hour until tender and eaten hot or cold (I like them cold with olive oil, garlic and sliced onion)). It does not matter. Pie is forgiving, open-minded, inclusive. As long as you put in a little effort, show a little care, it will reward you.

If you bring a pie to the farm this Sunday and impress the pie contest judges with your effort and care (well, actually we tend to judge the pies on taste and texture, but I don’t want to spoil the mood) more than any of the other competitors we will reward you with an Alleged Farm t-shirt.

Not that you have to bring a pie in order to come to the farm this Sunday. The pieless are welcome too. In addition to the pie contest we will tour the fields, harvest potatoes, make hot sauce. You can gather some husk cherries, meet other members, swap recipes, commiserate with one another about having to eat all those vegetables. And, of course, eat some real pie. The farm crew gets to judge the pies, but everyone gets to eat them.