Says deathless Emerson: The eye can’t satisfy unless it has a horizon. In the place you grew up, where was yours? How far could you see? Was there a road by your house? Where did it lead? To eradicate blackberry brambles, one must believe in rhizomes. What was your first encounter with a wild animal? How far were you allowed to roam? You’ll know a plant is non-native if it’s called invasive. In what sort of landscape do you feel safest? Where do you belong?
Weather psychics have promised a balmy 74 degrees for mid-day Saturday, September 24, the last Pie Stand of summer 2011. As always, I’m going to make a slew of seasonal pies, which means I’ll be using the last of the peaches and plums, the first of the Gravensteins (the perfect pie apple), whatever’s left of the marionberries, raspberries, and blackberries, and that seasonless fruit (at least around Seattle, where we’d have better luck growing avocados) the lemon. Slices ($3-$5), mini pies ($10-12), and full pies ($30-35) will all be for sale. The coffee and conversation will be free. Kids and dogs welcome!
Pie Stand is on Saturday, Sept 24 from 11 to 3 pm or until I sell out. And I will sell out. Make sure you get piece of the pie by e-mailing me to pre-order one–or two. E-mail me at kate@pie-scream.com for the secret address. See you Saturday!
Before I start on imaginary blackberry pie, I need to say something that isn’t easy to say. The new apartment? The new blog? They’re mine–I made them–because last month I left my boyfriend of five years. We lived together, which is what prompted my father to say “this is like a divorce” when he was trying to help me plan the logistics of the move. As Sugar from the Rumpus would say, “I broke my own heart,” not to mention his, and in respect for what we’re both going through, I won’t get into details here. What I want to talk about is what I needed most after this trauma, even more than food, which doesn’t taste so good when you’re really really sad.
Space.
Not necessarily new space, but more. And how the only way to get more space was for me to move into new ones. This one-bedroom apartment with its good light and built-in bookshelves. Pie-scream, a fresh blog where I can obsess about my favorite subject. I’ve started to say “no” to perfectly wonderful opportunities because being too busy doesn’t allow for the emotional space I need right now. And what I’m least familiar with and most curious about: space within my writing. I’m not talking about a bigger desk. I mean I wonder how this hunger for spaciousness will show up in my poems. Here’s how it shows up in the blog: imaginary blackberry pie.
It’s made from blackberries you find at your new house. Renegade blackberries–the kind that grow in any ignored patch of dirt in Seattle–are in your back patch of dirt, crouching around the weed choked garden and shading the lawn. You wonder if, like fleas, blackberries can sense the presence of humans through vibrations in the ground, but instead of hatching at the sound of footsteps, blackberries wait for all the footsteps to recede before they sneak out and start taking over their little forgotten acre.
You see these blackberries and you hatch a plan: on the day you get your keys to the new apartment, you’ll pick a pie’s worth as a sort of private housewarming, Mary Oliver-style, letting your body “love what it loves.” You’ll use a little of the champagne the previous tenants left you (the discovery of that kindness made you tear up; you tear up a lot lately) and of course sugar and lemon, a little nutmeg, and wrap it all in galette or pie dough, whatever you’re feeling like that day. And when you make the crust, you’ll make a mess, get flour everywhere, throw it around on purpose because no one is going to walk in and say “You’re trying to kill me!” or actually get horribly ill from the grains afloat in the air. Your ex has celiac disease. Blackberry pie is a treat you couldn’t make for him without fifteen different flours, one of which you were always out of. You’d substitute and experiment because you loved him, and you wanted him to be able to eat dessert. Now you need only one flour. Wheat flour. A flour so common that we all know we mean “wheat” when we say “flour.” You’ve heard he’s not feeling well today, something he ate, and you suppress the urge to call and help him suss out the culprit. That’s no business of yours anymore. He’s a grown man. He’ll find his desserts and poisons himself.
The day you move in, you notice the rosebush out front has been pruned drastically back. The dandelions have all lost their heads. Fallen plums have disappeared too fast to blame the birds. And, yes, the blackberries are gone. The last four inches of their canes stick out of the ground like the top branches of drowned trees. The garden service was here. Hey, it’s great that you have a garden service. You thought you’d have to mow the lawn yourself. But you’re sad that the blackberries were cut down in their prime. Without blackberries, you have to invent a new housewarming pie. That’s when imaginary blackberry pie becomes the perfect plan.
Perfect because, if you’re being honest, you have no time to make pie this week. You still have a three bedroom house to clean, an attic to muck out, and a garden to abandon at the old place. At the new place, your kitchen is in order, but every time you unpack a box, two boxes arrive to fill its place. And if you’re still being honest with yourself, your blackberry pie recipe isn’t as great as it could be. Tapioca flour, your usual thickener, can’t quite keep the blackberries in check, so your pie is soupy. Because you usually use frozen berries, they bake in whole shapes. This seems like a good idea when you think about how blackberry pie filling can be as gummy as old jam, but in practice it’s pretty disconcerting when the berries fall out of the crust whole and you have to chase them around the plate with a fork. But these blackberries are imaginary. You can make them do anything you want. Even better, you can ask other people for help–you’ve gotten good practice at that lately. Maybe they’ll know the secret you’ve been searching for. Maybe they’ll share it.
Imaginary Blackberry Pie
To write this recipe, I need your help. What are your secrets to the perfect blackberry pie? What’s your favorite recipe? How do you make it? When do you make it? Who do you make it for? You can answer any or all of these questions by commenting on this post. If you’ve got a full recipe text to share (bigger than a link), send it to kate@pie-scream.com. I’ll pick my favorite and post it in the coming weeks.
People who love chocolate cream pie move through this world in a swarm of music. Their cars leak baselines like oil; their exhaust sings from the dark of the pipe. Periodically they experiment with the softness of their genders and find them lacking every time, wear skirts to feel the hair on their thighs and pants to bind their bodies into the clean lines of a park bench. They invite you to sit down. The chocolate pie lover would like to convince you that she is three inches taller than the crown of her head. She’ll use words like chrysanthemum, tercet, cheekbone and freckle to woo your belief. She isn’t lying, exactly. She’s creating the truth believer by believer, just as you would if you too had a voice as big as a church.
Galettes are a fast and sophisticated route to dinner or dessert. Fast because you can forget the precision of crimping and fluting edges; sophisticated for no other reason than it’s French. The crust bakes up tender instead of flaky, which can make a rich filling less overwhelming, and you can fill it with anything–roasted vegetables, peaches, apples, frangipane and plums. If it sounds like a good idea, it probably is. The dough is wetter, more pliable, easier to handle, and harder to mess up than American-style pie dough, so it’s great for handpies and new pie-makers. If you’re short on time and patience, give a galette a try.
Galettes can be baked in a regular pie dish, freeform on a cookie sheet (just make sure not to go overboard on the filling or the juices will certainly overflow), or in a cast iron skillet. There’s no secret to how to use a skillet here–the iron conducts heat better than glass or ceramic, so your pie might bake faster, that’s all.
I prefer to use my cast iron pan because it looks cool. When I bring it to the table, people expect to see roast chicken or cornbread or something equally Americana, and instead they get a lazy french tart. This is, in a nutshell, my main recipe-creation strategy: start with something familiar, make something essential about it unfamiliar, and bam, you’ve got everyone’s attention. You can do that with ingredients. You can do that with booze. You can even do it with dishes.
Because I’m accustomed to making mile-high American-style pies, I tend to overfill my galettes. The only consequence of this habit worth considering is that the juice inevitably bubbles out and caramelizes around the edge of the pan. This is annoying if you’re not actually using a pan to bake your galette. But if you are, like me, using a cast iron skillet, and if you, like me, sprinkle the top of your galette with crunchy sugar, than you are, like me, creating the sweet equivalent of the toasted cheese on the edge of the nacho pan. Otherwise known as “the best part.”
Galette Dough
1 and 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons butter cut into 1/2 inch chunks
1/4 cup sour cream
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1/4 cup ice water
demerara sugar (for sprinkling)
Whisk the sour cream, lemon juice, and ice water in a two-cup liquid measuring cup and chill it in the freezer while preparing the flour and fat.
In a medium bowl, combine flour and salt. Toss in the butter and rub it into the flour between your fingers and thumbs, letting the chunks drop back into the bowl. Keep breaking up big butter pieces until you have a few walnut-sized pieces, a handful of almond-sizes pieces, and a lot of pea-sized pieces.
In a thin stream, pour half the chilled liquid over the flour and fat mixture. Toss everything lightly a couple times, then pour almost all of the rest of the liquid in a thin stream over the dough. Toss again. The dough should hold together (no puffs of dry flour) and feel tacky. Expect it to feel much wetter than American pie dough, but not so wet that it’s like batter. The dough should hold together easily in a ball. Add the rest of the liquid, if needed.
Gather the dough into a ball and firmly, with your palms and thumbs, press the dough into a thick disc. Wrap it in plastic and refrigerate it for a half hour or so.
Prepare your filling, whatever it may be. I’ll have lots of recipes for this on Pie-Scream soon.
When rolling it out, use lots of flour on your rolling surface and pin. I roll it out directly on the counter, lifting and turning the dough with a pastry scraper periodically so it doesn’t stick. You can also roll it out on wax or parchment paper.
Once the dough is about 1/4-inch thick and in a large round, transfer it to your pie plate. I do this by rolling it over my rolling pin or folding the dough in half, then in quarters, and lifting it into the pan. You can also just transfer the dough on its parchment paper to a cookie sheet.
Layer the filling in the dough. Grab the edge of the dough and pull it toward the center of the galette. Grab another spot about three or four inches down and pull it toward the center, creating a sweet little mess of pleats. You might have a big open window in the center of your galette where you can see the filling, or you might have just a crack between the edges of the dough where the filling peaks out. It depends on how big your pan is, and it’s all good as long as there is a still a hole for steam to vent through. Brush with milk, dust with sugar or salt, and bake according to the instructions in your recipe.
The Swedish have a word for hunger that sounds like ice before it’s scraped off a windshield and, when held in the mouth, glints like a metal tooth. The lingonberry pie lover is like this word, so he collects antique orthodontia and cultivates peculiar hungers. The scent of gasoline evaporating from asphalt, the sneer of grass on a good dress. Being told no or slow down when in proximity of food makes the lingonberry pie lover capable of aggravated misdemeanors. I don’t suggest testing this assertion.
I don’t usually dread packing up my house and moving to a new one, but this is the first time I’ve had to move a whole kitchen. Gadgets, glassware, 15 pie plates and way more cast iron than the average 21st century girl should have. I’ve been thinking a lot about Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s how-to writing book, where she tells a story about how her father helped her through a bout of grade-school writer’s block by telling her that she should write her report about American fowl “bird by bird.” It’s good advice, and not just for writing. “Box by box, ” I’m telling myself as I pack four years of life into cardboard and bubble wrap. That and what my friend Kristen texted me a night I needed help: Keep everything get more boxes. Like this one, full of twenty years of writing notebooks.
Pie making will resume soon. In the meantime, I hope you’ll tune in to 94.9 KUOW on September 7. Sometime between 2 and 3 pm they’re going to air a poem and interview I recorded with Elizabeth Austen (whose book I still haven’t packed). Tomorrow I’m reading with my old friend Elizabeth J Colen, who hates pie but writes phenomenal poems and fiction anyway. We’ll celebrate the publication of her first novella at Elliott Bay Bookstore, 7 pm.
Keep everything. Get more boxes. Box. By. Box.
Only one woman alive today would say her favorite pie is mincemeat. She makes hers with green tomatoes and mixed assorted meat-stuffs from the icebox. Her grandchildren hide her slices in their mouths and spit them into milk glasses when she gets up to answer the telephone. No thank you. Now is not a good time. She wanted to be a writer. She took photographs and painted, wore Isadora colored scarves that coiled around her shoulders and covered her hair like hair, was the most beautiful woman in town and justifiably vain. She likes to imagine her movements as gusts of wind blowing her children around the world, her little boats.
