I did not grow up in a household where dessert was a regular thing. More often than not, when we asked about a sweet treat after dinner, we were pointed to the fruit bowl or a jar of applesauce. However, once or twice a year, there would be pie.
The pie happened on no particular schedule. My mom baked in response to her own cravings and could not be hurried or begging into producing pie. We learned early that it was better to leave her alone and accept the serendipitous pie than try to wheedle it into being. And accept it, we did. Her pies were always sturdy, not-too-sweet creations that piled mountains of fruit into a nutty, half whole wheat crust. My favorite thing was being allowed a slice for breakfast the next day.
Thanks to this early conditioning, pie will be forever feel like a way create a special occasion out of a Wednesday evening. It’s one of the things I hope to do with my kids someday (of course, I have to have them first).
You may be asking yourself, why is Marisa waxing poetic about her childhood pie memories? I recently got a review copy of Ashley English’s new book, A Year of Pies, and now I can’t stop thinking about tucking food, both sweet and savory, between layers of crust.
Some of you probably know Ashley from her blog, Small Measure, or from her other four (!) books on all manner homesteady topics like Keeping Bees and Canning and Preserving. This book is similar in organization to her previous ones in that it offers an extensive section towards the front of the book that walks you through the equipment, the different kinds of crusts (and what each is best for), tips on rolling and the various techniques you can employ to achieve gorgeous crusts, before moving on to the recipes.
Once through that grounding section, the rest of the book is arranged by season, proving unequivocally that pie isn’t just a summer and fall dessert. Any winter day would be made better by the Maple Orange Walnut Pie on page 55 on the Carrot Pie on page 77.
The book contains sweet pies, savory pies (like the homey Chicken Pot Pie pictured below), tarts, galettes, crostada and hand pies. There are both bake and no-bake options and even a pie version of Polish-style stuffed cabbage. Ashley also invited a few of her blogging friends to contribute recipes, including a Gluten-Free Streusel Apple Pie from Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking author Kate Payne.
For those of us who are working our way through baskets of berries and armloads of peaches this time of year, I think it’s important to put a little of that fruit aside and make something that allows us to enjoy the bounty now, as well as later. Pie is on my to-do list for later this week.
When I was young
I remember my grandfather
wiping his beard
turned hot pink and purple, strawberry rhubarb pie.
The Castle Danger Inn.
It was the place where they “did rhubarb right.”
I learned to make pies from my Aunt Mary — who is justly famous in our family for her annual Thanksgiving apple pie that surpasses my ability to explain in its sweet-tart-cinnamon-crispy wonderfulness. I didn’t even like pies at the time, but I wanted to be able to bake for others. Through making pies, I’ve become a pie lover myself. I think what I didn’t like was the gooey “fruit” fillings which weren’t, and the soft crusts from grocery-store-bakeries of my childhood.
Now the crust recipe is one of a handful that I have memorized, to make everywhere I go in a pinch, last minute for hospitality, etc. I was shocked the other day to realize that my mother herself doesn’t have the basics at top of mind when she asked when to pull out the pie I’d slid into the oven on my way out the door!
But looking at this book, maybe I need to branch out beyond my go-to recipe and try something more exciting!
I’m better at eating pie than making tem, so this would be a great book for me!
My grandma always made me strawberry pie….loved it…..miss it 🙁
as a just married bride, I wanted to impress my BIL and my hubby. Made 2 pumpkin pies. took them to where they worked…both ate their piece and gave me a wondering look…I just had to ask…”well’ what do you think?”…OOOPS I had done it all but NO sugar! AND being thrifty (read broke here..LOL) I took the rest of the pies back home. Put the custard on the stove, added the sugar. cooked a little and we finished off the pie and it was pretty good…NOT pretty but you know what I mean..LOL that was 50 yrs ago and the family kept me anyway. I have improved some since then.
Pie has been very influential in my life! I think that apple pie might have been the very first thing I baked on my own. My first kitchen disaster was a from-scratch pumpkin pie – it resulted in a sweet pumpkin soup in soggy crust. I know that my very, very favourite dinner as a kid was a savoury pie – sometimes with beef, sometimes lentil and mushrooms, sometimes chicken. I don’t make pie *often*, but I *do* love it.
My husband’s grandmother made pies several times a week – and several pies at a time. There was always a treat waiting for visitors. I love to makes pies, too, although not as often. Tonight there will be fresh picked blueberry and peach pie at our house.
Two fun facts about pie:
– In the 19th century, apple and other fruit pies were a fairly common breakfast item. Fruit pie was considered part of a good hearty meal before a hard day’s work.
– Pie came to America with the first English settlers. The early colonists cooked their pies in long narrow pans calling them ‘coffins’ like the crust in England. As in the Roman times, the early American pie crusts often were not eaten, but simply designed to hold the filling during baking. It was during the American Revolution that the term crust was used instead of coffyn.
(source: http://www.foodreference.com/html/fpie.html)
My favourite pies are pumpkin and pecan. Other than being tasty and delicious, they remind me of fall/winter, Thanksgiving, leaves changing colours, family gatherings and college football.
My old boyfriend was the king of pies in his family. He taught me everything he knew, and now I’m the queen of pies in my family! My family always requests a cherry pie for every occasion, but I’m more of a chocolate bourbon pecan type of girl…
I have never been a big fan of cake, but I love pies. I didn’t get many as a kid, so I am changing that as an adult. My husband and I had pie at our wedding instead of cake. A mennonite family of 7 made us 24 pies. We gave a number away at the end of the ceremony, but we still arrived home from our honeymoon to six pies in our deep freeze. it was wonderful working our way through those.
Now that we are three years into our marriage, my husband and I make pies every six weeks or so. I make up the crust and the filling. He makes it look like a pie : ). We have a great partnership.
I learned about clearJel, and just love it for fruit pies. No more runny or gummy filling.
My grandma was the baker at a bowling alley and would whip out 30 pies a day. So when we visited years later she would always make a couple pies each day. She made chocolate, lemOn, banana, butterscotch. Grandma’s house was like pie heaven.
Having gone GF I dream about conquering my fears of baking and making a pie all for myself.
Most of my pie memories are ones I’ve made myself. My husband is a huge pie fan, so I make them for him, most of the time. One of our collective favorite pies is a blueberry cream pie that is seriously awesome!
My mother makes the best pies. Fantastic crusts. I touch things too much, so my crusts don’t work out so well. Too much heat in my hands these days. My favorite pie is my mother’s pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. She uses my grandmother’s pie plate and it is all just perfect.
i make pie weekly, since i like to have pie on hand for friends & neighbors who stop by…. i love watching the seasons change through the ingredients– starting out the beginning of the year with rhubarb— rounding up the end of the year with apple…. however, my very favorite is plum with a hint of cinnamon!
My favorite thing to do is make pies for my family. My husband loves peanut butter pie. My children love pumpkin, apple and oreo pie. My favorite is pumpkin pie made from a pumpkin, not from canned pumpkin.
Ooh. Pie. Growing up I ruined an obscenely high number of my grandmother’s pies in clutziness – dropping them, failing to hold them as we drove around a turn… but none of my mishaps trumped the time my sister dove into the back seat of our van in a moment of goofing off, right into the three thanksgiving pies carefully set out there. Whoops. ; )
I have just started diving in to pie making. I was surprised that I could make a pie crust that was so delicious. My confidence is building!
Pie is my favorite dessert!!! Its hard to pick a favorite. I always requested pumpkin pie for my October birthday, but these days if there is one thing I cannot resist – it is key lime pie….mmmmm….now I want pie.
I love Apple Pie with Dutch topping!
My Grandma Ella was famous for her raspberry pies. However, as she got older she sometimes forgot to put the thickening in, and when she arrived with a freshly baked pie we never knew if we were going to need a fork or a spoon to eat it! 🙂
I can’t say I have any pie stories…I do bake pie weekly…usually apple, butternut squash, coconut cream and on occasion the “fake” apple made with Ritz crackers…
I’m not a big pie person, but I could never live without sugar pies at Christmas time, filling consist of brown sugar, heavy cream & butter! Yum!
My favorite pie is actually a rustic galette with in-season plums (or apples, during apple season) on a layer of home-made jam or jelly (usually cherry). It’s become one of my signature dishes despite how guilty I feel about it: it’s so EASY and requires almost no effort to make, but it gets oohs and ahhs, and disappears in minutes, whilst a cake I could spend hours on gets a more tepid welcome. There’s just something about a well-made pie dough and fresh, seasonal fruit that taps into our animal consciousness, I think. 🙂
My grandmother made the best shoofly pie–homemade crust and everything! I made her teach me how to make them (including her secret to thin flaky crusts), so I was able to replicate those pies at home. Brings back great memories when I enjoy a slice with coffee for breakfast…..
My grandfather was a farmer who learned to make pie after my grandmother went blind. We were allowed to eat it any time of day – breakfast, dinner, snack – it didn’t matter. And he always told us there were only two kinds of pie he liked… “hot and cold.”
This is actually my partner’s childhood pie story, but I can’t resist. Him and his older brother, about 9 and 12 respectively, decided to make the new next-door neighbor a welcome pie. They preceded with the dough and were just about to roll it out when their mother left the house. Sans supervision, they decided it would be a great idea to stretch the dough by trying to throw/twirl it pizza-style over the main beam of the cathedral ceiling in their living room. This resulted in a few “pick the crust up off the floor” moments as well as one “crap, it’s stuck on the ceiling…will it come down?” moment. However, to this day, the unwitting neighbor says to them when they visit their parents’ home, “That was the best pie I ever ate. You boys should have been bakers.”
Nothing tastes or smells better then an apple, walnut caramel pie!
As a kid my favorite pie was lemon meringue. Now I would have to say my favorite is apple pie.
My Mom loved to make pies. And her pies were scrumptious! Her favorites were Pippen apple in the fall and Olallieberry in the early summer. Her crust was light and flaky, although she really didn’t measure the ingredients. She’d randomly scoop flour in a bowl, add Crisco until “it looked right” and then add cold water to form the dough. But when I make pie dough I must measure! My Mom’s pie making skill is something I envy!
My favorite dessert has always been just about any kind of pie. When i Was young, while on vacation at my grandmother’s I picked a bucket of raspberries and decided to make my first raspberry pie. However, I forgot to add any thickening and we had soup pie.
Time for pies to make a comeback. Pecan’s my fave but thinking about Mom’s Peach Cream Pie too.
I love pumpkin pie! I make it all year long, not just for the winter holidays. Thank you for a fabulous giveaway!
Nothing is sweeter tasting in my memory than my Mom’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie…
Stacy
Lard. Lard, lard, lard. I could say it all day. That and vodka are key to a perfect crust for any fruit pie. (Or nut pie. Or custard pie. You get the idea.) Yep, nothing says good ol’ American pie like pork and liquor.
In all seriousness, I will share my other key ingredient for the consummate not-too-sweet apple pie: Northern Spy and Baldwin apples. Delicious.
My grandmother used to make the most beautiful, delicious pies – raspberry was my favourite! And as much as I’ve tried, mine are never as fab as hers. Who am I kidding! Mine barely qualify as “pie” lol!! This book looks beautiful!!
Ooooooo!! I would love to have this book. Pie is my husbands favorite form of payment, generally used in exchange for doing the “icky” things on his honey-do list. Given that we are in the midst of a “homestead experiment” in which we are making changes in our lives to prepare us for the day that we move to our dream homestead, making a pie is a homestead task in our house – rendering the lard, getting butter from the dairy down the road, picking the fruit for the filling, etc. It is a special treat 🙂 I’d love to surprise him with a whole recipe book of pies to dog-ear for future payments.
Love Thanksgiving for the pumpkin pie or the sweet potato pie or the apple pie…OH the possibilities are endless! Not sure why I don’t enjoy them more throughout other times of the year….maybe I would eat too much of a good thing! 😛
When I was 16, I wanted to enter a pie in the local fair. I spent a week making apple pie after apple pie (we had trees in the back yard full of apples). My dad critiqued my efforts… “the crust is too thick;” “the apples are too thin.” Was this his quest for perfection or simply a ruse to get more pie? Finally, the morning arrived. The pie had to be at the fair 45 minutes away by noon. I pulled that last pie from the oven. I had made prettier practice pies. Sigh. We didn’t go back to the fair until the last day, so we could bring all other entries home. My pie won a blue ribbon! My dad later found out that his 16 year old daughter beat out a local resident who had been taking home the blue ribbon for as long as anyone could remember…
I always looked forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas because than we would have pumpkin pie, dutch apple and my all time favorite coconut custard.
Really never met a pie I didn’t like. But once I walked into a hole in the wall restuarant and saw a slice of fresh homemade cherry pie. Before I sat down I claimed that slice of pie and inquired about more. It was the “last slice”. I promised bodily harm if I didn’t get my pie at the end of my not so eventful meal.
The pie was the perfect ratio of fruit and sauces. The crust was buttery and flaky and crunchy. Truly I dream of this pie at night.
I suppose sour cream raisin is my favorite pie although like my dad it could be my favorite pie is “with or without” (ice cream that is) 🙂
I *adore* lemon pie!!! : )
My grandmother always made chocolate pie and my mother made buttermilk pie. More likely than not they were with store bought crust. I’ve become pretty good at making homemade pie crusts and the pie possibilities are endless. I just made peach & ginger and sausage and apple hand pies a couple weeks ago….yummy!
My favorite memory is of a peanut butter pie that my sister’s mother in law makes. She was a home ec. teacher in NC and man can she cook. Thanks for the giveaway. 🙂
I have never made pie, but this book looks like the type of book that would certainly get me motivated! Thanx for the giveaway opportunity….
Ohhhh, pie! My best girlfriend’s father was a master baker for over 35 years in Philadelphia at Hanscom’s and other commercial bakeries. At one point later in life, he owned his own bakery. I lost my father when I was very young, so her Dad was who I looked to as a fatherly figure and as such, I was considered part of the family.
It was part of the familial benefits to have access to his baked goods and when he retired, what did he do? Bake and deliver pies and other baked items to friends and family.
I’m not usually keen on the crust. Just never been my thing and often I eat only the top and bottom, but when I ate his pie, sweet or savory…I’d devour the entire pie, crust and all…it was the tenderest and most delicate crust ever and fillings were scrumptious regardless of whether sweet or savory.
He’s now making pie in the sky…I have a lot to live up to if I want to make such pies.
I have never liked fruit pie to much, but a cream pie is another story. My grandmother taught me to make Butterscotch Pie from scratch and to this day when I make it I think of her. It is an amazing pie!!
As a newly enthused baker i discovered pie making this summer. I’ve been THAT fiend who makes pie dough on a muggy hot summer day just for a slice and a scoop of ice cream just for me. This book would totally be put to delicious use.