Dear friends,
As promised, today I am kicking off Tales Out of Eureka Springs with a story that has been told so many times that I almost feel compelled to turn it into stanzas, much like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Luckily for you, I will not. I will simply call it the Tale of the Accidental Pie and leave it at that. I could stop being pretentious and just refer to it as cherry pie, but I won’t because this is not my idea of a cherry pie. On the other hand, it’s good enough to deserve a name of its own.
The road to the Accidental Pie began with a food adventure that ate up close to an entire damn day. Part of the point of a writers’ colony is that in exchange for the money you send to them (or the money that your fellowship underwriters send to them), they will take care of your room and board. At Dairy Hollow, we want for nothing. The cook fixes us dinner on weeknights. All other times, we are invited to use the kitchen and to take whatever food we want. If we want something the Colony doesn’t stock, we are invited to write it on the board on the fridge and they will pick it up for us on their next supermarket run. If you are lucky enough to stay in the room with that giant superb kitchen, i.e. me, you can take the food from the main kitchen back to your kitchen and cook it yourself. I have to remind myself that the Colony will buy me anything to eat that I want, that I don’t have to spend my own cash on it. The problem is that I like the whole process of shopping, and unless I tag along on market runs, crying “buy me this! buy me this!” like a six-year-old, I won’t be able to indulge the shopping bug. Said bug has only been made worse by a phone call two days before my departure, from a pal of mine who is also staying at the Colony, who says brightly, “Oh, you’ll love Eureka Market! They have everything you can get at the health food store in New York, but they have a sign saying ‘Pie cherries are in!’” I can feel myself getting giddy at her words. Pie cherries are a rare jewel, in season only for about eight weeks in the summertime. I will have access to pie cherries in Eureka, and a grand kitchen in which to bake them. On my arrival in town, I can’t get myself to Eureka Market fast enough. “We can get them for you,” says the store manager, a very nice young man. “We don’t usually stock them, but we can get them. We have to order them by the case. Can you use a whole case of them?” Well, golly. I can probably make about two pies, which will still leave pints and pints of cherries, but heck, I can make cherry jam out of them.
It is my first Friday at the Colony, June 18. I head to the kitchen to grab some cereal, when Jan, the assistant director of the Colony, tells me that I have a message: Eureka Market has called and the pie cherries have arrived. Off to the market, via two trolley lines, I go. “I’m here to pick up some pie cherries,” I announce brightly to the young woman at the counter. “Oh, you must be Jen,” she says, and hands me a small, densely packed case. It is an odd shape for a case of fresh fruit, but I’m not overly concerned. I can’t wait to open the case and bury my nose into it, to smell that bright bracing fragrance, just aching to be turned into pie. I rip the case open.
What we have here is a case of two parties making assumptions and neglecting to define terms. If you scroll down a bit, you will see what I consider pie cherries. What I consider pie cherries are fresh, raw sour cherries, a/k/a tart cherries, Montmorency cherries, morello cherries, etc. If you click here, you will see what the market staff considers to be pie cherries. As canned cherries go, they are a fine product: organic cherries, canned in organic pear juice, no added sugar, but they have two strikes against them: they are canned, not fresh, and they are sweet black cherries, not tart reds. I have a case of them. 12 cans. It’s not what I want, but the market people are so nice and apologetic, and after all this is a special order for me, that I agree to take them, and see what magic can be worked with them. I decide to pick up “a few more things,” which translates to a little bottle of arrowroot (just in case I can make pie from those cherries, after all), a pint of raspberries, a quart of little red new potatoes, half a dozen rapidly ripening and softening nectarines, a bag of almond meal, a quart of vanilla yogurt, a pint of heavy cream (in glass bottle) and a quart of whole milk (ditto) from Hosanna Hills Farm. And, of course, a case of 12 cans of cherries. I have just spent $70 and encumbered myself with 30 pounds of groceries, not counting the box of cherries. It is entirely fitting that I am living in America’s Largest Open-Air Asylum.
This pie really had the odds stacked against it, and yet it came out on top, like the scrappy underdogs of Chariots of Fire, or Meatballs, or Disney Presents The Strongest Man in the World starring Kurt Russell. I would call it the Little Pie That Could, but I won’t. For starters, it was a pretty big pie.
The Accidental Pie was a two-fold accident. Not only did I have the wrong kind of cherries, I also had a crust that should have been straightforward but left me near-to-weeping in confusion. I should have just told the truth and begged off prettily, but I had told one of my fellow writers of my plans, and she looked so ecstatic at the thought of cherry pie—on her last dinner at the Colony, no less!—that I vowed to do it. I had promised Karen a cherry pie, and cherry pie would we have. Measuring revealed that once the pear juice was poured off, 1 15 oz. can = 1 cup of cherries. I used four cans. As I do with my “regular” cherry pie recipe, I took a cup of them, put them in a saucepan, shook a couple tablespoons of sugar over them and turned on the heat. Eventually the cherries began to cook down, fall apart and bubble. I tasted them and threw in a little more sugar. Because the liquid looked a little low, I threw in some of the merlot I brought back from dinner. If I had to guess, it would have been about 1/3 cup, although a more accurate unit of measurement would be “glug...hesitate...glug again.” When it looked about right to me, after maybe 5 minutes, I put 2 tablespoons of arrowroot into a custard cup and made a slurry out of it. Again, I couldn’t remember if that was how much I usually used; it just seemed like a nice round number. I’d like to say that I have an instinctive knowledge of the basic principles of kitchen science, but let’s be honest: dumb luck was on my side. I added the arrowroot slurry to the boiling cherry-wine syrup. It turned to mucilage in about 20 seconds. Through the fog of panic I reminded myself that this was what it’s supposed to do, because I have another three cups of cherries going into that pie, and that arrowrooty paste will help to gently thicken the juices that are exuded by the rest of the cherries in baking. I turn the paste into the bowl of cherries, stir, stir, stir, and add almond extract, a trick I learned from my teacher Nick Malgieri at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School. Cherry pie needs almond extract; I believe this with the fervor of one who has just found Jesus.
But I am getting ahead of myself, describing the filling. I did something dumb, namely try something new on a crowd of strangers. I was so convinced that this pie would need all the help it could get that I had the bright idea to make the almond pie crust from Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking. Normally when I make cherry pie, I forgo my old standard flaky pie crust for something called pate sucree, a sweeter, cakier dough. So I didn’t think it would be as much of a stretch to use a more cookie-fied recipe. Chef Yard’s recipe calls for all-purpose flour, pastry flour, almond meal, butter, egg and a full cup of sugar. “It has a tendency to crumble,” she warns. There’s a funny object there, that tendency. I was already in an advanced state of nerves from opening up the pastry flour from the health food store and discovering that it was, in fact, whole wheat pastry flour. Wait, that’s not what I bought! Ohhhh...there it is, running up the side of the package in the thinnest Bodoni font imaginable: “Whole-Grain.” I reached into the bag and made a fist: well, it sure feels like pastry flour, low-protein flour made from soft wheat. What the hell, between the butter and the almonds, no one will be able to tell. The resulting pastry chilled to rock-hardness in the fridge, as pastry doughs do...only it stayed that way after I took it out. This dough does not have a tendency to crumble. It has a mandate. Despite my careful flouring and reflouring of the marble, despite my gentle and persistent loosening of the dough from the work surface with my bench scraper, it would not behave. Split, rip, shatter. I had to apply the mud-pie technique, patting sections of it into the pan, patching and patting until I was sure that all the air that had been incorporated into that lovely dough would be mooshed out, leaving only heaviness and soddenness behind. With great care and effort, I rolled out another sheet, cut some strips for a lattice, and banged everything into the freezer, where they would await the completed pie filling.
Feel free at this point to sing to the tune of “Bang Goes the Drum and You’re in Love.” On goes the oven. Out comes the shell. In go the cherries. Out come the lattice strips...and here everything falls apart, literally and figuratively. I cannot lift the strips off the pan without their breaking into three pieces. Those few pieces that do leave the sheet tray intact crumble upon being placed on the pie. Finally, in a voice that my mom and I jokingly refer to as “That’s it! No tip!,” I announce to an empty kitchen: “That’s it! We’re having streusel!” And I whale on these strips, ripping them to shreds, flicking them off my fingers and onto the surface of the pie, not so much as to cover the whole surface, but enough to be considered proper topping. On goes the egg wash, in goes the pie.
And my word, but doesn’t that crust bake beautifully? For a split second I’m afraid it’s burning, but no, it’s just baking to the deep brown that comes with a lot of sugar in the dough, plus the presence of milk solids in the butter. The cherries are dark and shiny in their bubbly juice. Did I manage to cheat the universe? I’m still not convinced. As with pudding, the proof of the pie is in the eating.
To dinner the pie goes, to be served with Blue Bunny vanilla ice cream. There are four of us at dinner, three women, one man. Karen, for whom I made the pie, opens her eyes wide at first bite. “This is such a wonderful crust!” she cries. “It almost tastes like blueberry pie,” says Alison, and she’s right, it does. Forrest eats without making a sound, eventually concurring that it’s a successful pie. Everyone looks happy as they eat it, except for me. I look relieved.
Dear friends, for your consideration, the Accidental Pie is below, as well as a picture of the real pie cherries I bought at the Greenmarket this morning, the ones that will be turned into real cherry pie tomorrow. Will there be a picture of Real Cherry Pie? Oh, of course. Will there be recipes? You bet.
*drool*