My Mother's Pie

My mother loved good food, and she loved to cook for the people she cared about. She also battled weight issues all her life, usually carrying an extra fifteen or twenty pounds. Extra by some standards anyway; I never minded them myself.

My mother loved all the wrong things: bread, butter, and dessert, most of all pie, with a generous dollop of ice cream on the side -- and the best pie was invariably the one made by her. Whenever friends came to our house, pie was what they asked for. My usually genteel sister loved our mother's pie so much she'd lick the plate.

Our mother restrained herself. Though she might pick at the edges of leftovers late at night in the kitchen or finish off at breakfast what her guests hadn't taken care of the night before, she maintained a certain regretful discipline about indulging her love of good food. "But if I ever get a brain tumor," she used to say, "I won't count calories."

My mother could tell a story better than anyone I ever met. Anytime I called her up, I knew I'd hear a good one. But she was also a listener. For thirty five years, whenever anything went wrong in my life (and of course, it did) I felt she would be there to look after me. My father died when I was in my twenties, but the thought of my mother dying seemed not simply remote, but unimaginable.

Blessed with great health and seemingly inexhaustible energy for sixty six years, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor on Mother's Day of 1989. It was inoperable. My sister and I were told she'd probably die within a few weeks.

The day after getting the news I flew to her home in Toronto to help take care of her. She was in no particular pain, beyond the sorrow of having to say goodbye to a life she had been enjoying enormously, a loving partner she'd met fifteen years earlier, after her divorce from my father, a circle of friends who adored her, two daughters and four grandchildren whose growing- up she was not only watching but participating in with enormous interest.

The doctors sent my mother home from the hospital shortly after her diagnosis. She was able -- for a time at least -- to move around a little, visit with friends, sit in her garden admiring the flowers she'd planted. And have good meals. Even that first day I got the news, I remembered what she'd said for so many years about not counting calories. Evidently I couldn't make my mother well, but I could cook for her.

I was thirty- five at the time. Like my mother, when she was my age, I was inhabiting a marriage that had been in trouble for years, but like her, too, I was holding onto the idea that divorce would inflict too much pain and damage on my children -- three of them in my case, then aged 5, 7 and 11. The woman I was, the summer of my mother's diagnosis with the brain tumor, believed that maintaining the appearance of a happy home -- even if things were pretty ragged below the surface -- was preferable to breaking up our family. I wanted so badly to create, for our children, the picture of the five of us smiling (as we were, every year, on our family Christmas card) smiling, with our arms around each other, like the families I used to watch and envy on TV when I was little. I couldn't give up on the dream of that happy, traditional nuclear family.

The performance my husband and I were keeping up was not without cost, though. Looking at the Christmas card photographs from those days, I see it now in both our faces: Too much strain. Too little joy. Strain not just on us -- I realize now -- but on our children too.

My mother had waited till she was fifty -- and her children were grown -- to separate from my father. In the years since, I'd seen both of them make happier, better lives, apart, than they'd managed together. I'd asked my mother many times why she stayed so long, in a marriage as difficult as hers had been. Still, that was precisely the choice I'd made in my own marriage -- the choice of a known pain over an uncertain future.

For most of that long sad summer of my mother's dying, I stayed with her, travelling home to New Hampshire every few weeks for two or three days to see my children and my husband. In the months before my mother got sick, my marriage had been more strained than ever. Now, though, watching my one remaining parent slip away, I resolved to avoid divorce, no matter what. I couldn't afford to lose everything.

Meanwhile my energies were focused on my mother. She had always been a gifted, almost magical hostess. She was an easy, natural cook -- the kind who depends less on recipes than on instinct. She could make a meal out of whatever happened to be in her refrigerator, and was never put off by friends dropping by unannounced. To her -- raised in an immigrant Jewish family, where money was scarce but recipes and butter plentiful, there was no clearer way of expressing affection and care than to make a meal for someone. She'd been doing it for nearly forty years.

She had dozens of friends, all different kinds of people -- writers and business people, a minister, an actress, a sex therapist, the carpenter who built her rose arbor and the taxi driver who drove her to the airport one time. Now, as she was dying, it seemed right that she should have the chance to sit at her table with them as they came to see her and say goodbye, and share good food as they had in the past. Only this time, because she was dying, I'd be the one to make the food. Often it was pie.

My mother had never formally instructed me in the art of pie- crust- making. I'd acquired the skill just from watching her over the years: Her swift, confident strokes, cutting the shortening into the flour. Her firm, strong hand with the rolling pin. In the past, I'd' never thought about it much, but now, as I stood in her kitchen, making pies, I'd remember her advice to me over the years. For shortening, she swore by Crisco, accepting no substitutes. Her pie pan had to be Pyrex. "Never add more water than you need," she told me. "Never over-handle the dough." I could see her strong arms -- arms she always wished were slimmer -- cutting the shortening into the flour with the pastry blender. I could see her (this most of all) setting the steaming pie onto a hotplate, at the table, and serving up the slices to the people she loved. "Simple peasant food, " she said. "is always the best." (A child of the Depression, she used to point out how little it cost to make a pie. Using drop apples from the orchard, under a dollar probably.)

I bet I made three dozen pies that summer. Sometimes apple, sometimes rhubarb, sometimes a berry pie. The filling (though invariably delicious) wasn't the distinctive part of course: what set my mother's pies apart, as it does mine, is the crust. Several times, over the course of the summer, as friends came to see my mom, they'd mention how the loved her pie. One time someone actually asked: Do you think you could teach me how she did it?

The thing about making pie crust is this: Almost every recipe's identical. The secret's in the handling of the dough. That's why the best way to learn how to make a pie is by standing at the elbow of someone who makes one -- who probably learned, herself, from standing at the elbow of someone who taught her the same way. More than likely the person was her mother.

So that summer I spent in Toronto I started teaching my mother's friends to make pie. Crust in particular. By August, my mother wasn't entertaining guests around the table any more, or caring about pie, and the baking slowed down. My mother, who had taken so much pleasure in good food over the years, no longer cared much about eating. That, as much as any medical facts about her condition, made me understand that she was really dying.

On one of my trips home to New Hampshire from my mother's house, to see my children and my husband, he told me what our summer apart had revealed to him: that we shouldn't be together any more. At the time, hearing his words, I felt as if the ground was giving way under my feet. But I couldn't argue. We'd been in trouble for years, and no amount of counselling or shared desire to spare our children the trauma of divorce had changed that. So as the summer drew to a close, I knew it was not only my time with my mother that was ending but my marriage too, and the dream of that perfect family.

Back in Toronto, my mother was sleeping nearly all the time now, and speaking no more than the single word "love" now and then. One afternoon, on a break from sitting by her bed, I boarded a city bus to a beauty parlor where I instructed the hairdresser to chop off my long braids to a cut short as a boy's. Next time I came home, my youngest son didn't recognize me at first. I barely recognized my own self.

My mother died on October 3 of that year. Five days later, on October 8, I moved out of the house my husband and I had shared for twelve years, to a house in a different town thirty miles away, in a town where I knew nobody. The days and weeks that followed felt like the loneliest and most terrifying of my life. I'd wake up and forget I was in the new house, not the old one. I'd pick up the phone to call my mother, and actually start to dial before I realized: nobody there. One day I put on a sweater that had been hers, and a wave of her perfume hit me so strong tears came.

That was when I took out her rolling pin. I still remember the first pie I made, alone in the house I'd moved to after separating from my husband: the way my mother's voice came back to me as I sifted the flour and cut the shortening in. The memory of the pies she'd make for my dolls, using bottle caps for pie plates, and a single blueberry for the filling, and the way she always put a little extra dough on the sides of our own pie, so we could pick it off when the pie came of the oven.

At a time when when my whole world seemed nearly unrecognizable, the simple act of making a pie remained the same as it always was: Cutting the apples, smelling the cinnamon, sprinkling my grandmother's secret ingredient -- Minute Tapioca -- on the bottom of the crust, before piling on the apples. Making pie, I found my touchstone, the place where I could locate my mother still.

That Thanksgiving -- my first since the separation from my husband, seeing friends heading for visits with parents and relatives, where mine were both gone now -- I decided that instead of preparing the traditional Thanksgiving meal I'd to throw open the doors of my new house to give a pie party. "Bring your rolling pin, your pie pan, and six firm tart apples," I told my friends. "I'll supply the rest."

That first year a dozen friends came by to bake. Some were expert pie-makers already. (Watching them, I learned how many ways there are to make a pie. There are the bakers who use forks to cut in the shortening, and the ones who use their hands. As many different styles of baking as there are mothers who bake.)

We had made a plan to donate our pies to a soup kitchen in our town, loading them up in my station wagon at the end of the afternoon and carrying them into the room where the annual free Thanksgiving meal was to be served, still warm from the oven. Over the years, our annual party grew to the point where I'd gotten a local orchard to donate apples and the baking session continued all day at my house, with the number of pies we delivered to the soup kitchen going as high as thirty eight.

After a few years, people I barely knew started asking if they could come to one of my pie parties. And it came to me -- not all at once, but gradually -- that in the aftermath of so much loss and change, I'd made a new tradition. Not the one I'd copied from those images I'd grown up with and envied, of perfect traditional families -- parents and children, gathered around the table together for a holiday meal -- but a houseful of good friends, peeling apples and telling stories. The smell of baking. Laughter in the kitchen. A happy mess.

Eight years after my divorce -- with my daughter heading off to college and my sons entering their high school years -- we moved across the country, from New Hampshire, where I'd lived all my life, to the west coast. Once you ‘ve experienced the huge, incalculable losses of divorce and the death of your parents, a certain freedom and courage comes. You know you can survive because you already have. In my case, at least, that knowledge gave me the courage to leap into the unknown.

I knew two people in the Bay area of San Francisco when we moved there.

Not enough for a pie party. But I realized, unpacking my kitchen things, I needed to carry on the tradition of teaching my mother's pie. If the people who came to my home to bake with me wouldn't be friends, when they walked in my door, they might be by the time they left.

On a website I started, to share my writings and host a discussion forum for readers to tell stories of their lives, I posted a notice that I'd be holding a pie party at my home. Although the visitors to my website came from all over the country, enough local people read it that twenty five people signed up to come. As always, I asked them to bring their plate, rolling pin and apples, (also bowls and paring knives) and to contribute $25 to the woman, Myrna, who volunteers to run the website for me.

I wasn't sure how it would be, hosting a party of total strangers. It was raining that day, and my house is not large. Apples were everywhere.

Here's how it works at one of my pie parties. First we just greet each other of course. Everyone has a story about why she came (or why he did; it's not only women who come to make the pies). Some are gourmet cooks who say the one kitchen skill that always confounded them was pie crust. Some are high-powered career types who never baked anything from scratch in their lives. Some used to make pies, but life got too busy somewhere along the line, and they got out of the habit. Some say they were just curious what it would be like, coming to my house with a bunch of people they'd never met, to make pie.

We always gather in my dining room, and I demonstrate how I make a pie. This is where a lot of people will take out paper and pencil and want to write down the measurements and instructions, but I always stop them. Because the whole thing about pie -- as opposed to souffle, say -- is that it's a casual, inexact kind of thing, not a science. Measurements come later, but first I want everyone to simply get the feeling. As with dancing, you mustn't count the beats. You need to give yourself over to the music.

After my pie is made -- which takes me fifteen minutes, maybe, from peeling the apples to laying on the top crust -- it's time for everyone else to make theirs. Everyone finds a spot at my kitchen counter, my kitchen table, and at the three tables I've set up in my dining room. There's a lot of talk by now. Everyone's comparing notes, and not just on the subject of pie. While they get to work peeling their apples, I circulate round the tables offering advice (which is my mother's advice, really) about cutting the apples. (Make the pieces too small and you've got applesauce for filling. Too large, and the chunks won't cook through). I've never been one to measure things like sugar and cinnamon, myself -- preferring to dip my hand into the sugar bin and sprinkle on what feels like the right amount -- but there are always those in the group who like using a measuring cup, and I don't fight it.

The crust is the challenging part of course. I move around the room, picking up a pastry blender when needed to demonstrate my mom's technique, tossing an extra handful of flour into the bowl of someone who seems to have put a little too much shortening in her bowl, or a little more butter, if the mixture seems to lack the texture I'm looking for: little irregular-sized pearls of butter-and-Crisco-coated flour, the consistency of course meal. A lot of my pie students have the impulse to overwork their dough, or add too much water (which makes for an easier-handling dough, but a less flakey crust.) But we work it out -- and when necessary, I scavenge a bit of one woman's dough to fill out someone else's crust, or execute a swift repair. It's the laying on of the top crust that calls for the biggest act of faith and confidence of course -- that quick, brisk wrist-action that flips the dough from the wax paper we've rolled it out on to the top of the apples. Then comes the pinching of the corners, the brushing on of milk, the scattering of sugar. Some of us -- if we end up with extra dough -- roll out a little extra and cut a heart shape, or a flower (or, in the case of one pregnant pie baker, a baby) and press it onto the center of our pie.

My guests don't bake their pies though. They wrap them in plastic and set them in my refrigerator to bring home, so the wonderful smell of baking pie will fill their own kitchens later, when they go home. My own kitchen already smells good, from the pies I've made for the baking crew, because after everyone's done with the cooking phase of the party, we gather in my living room to eat the pie I've made and talk.

I think there's something about preparing food together -- particularly when the food's something like pie, that's likely to carry deep associations from the past -- that makes a person open up about her life. That's what tends to happen at my pie parties at least. I've hosted more of them than I can count now -- with guests I never met before they they show up on my doorstep with their rolling pins. But I have yet to host a pie party where someone didn't end up telling a story that made her weep. And when that happens, there are always others -- who never knew that person either, before -- who will embrace her, and offer stories of their own, back.

One time a woman flew to San Francisco all the way from Connecticut to come and bake with us. She brought me a silver pie server, and carried the pie she'd made home on the plane. (I love to think of her, taking it through the metal detector.) A woman came whose husband had just ended their marriage, and anotehr who'd recently lost a child. A couple came from Los Angeles, to bake. The wife had been dealing with the aftermath of a rape. The husband -- a professional magician -- brought a pack of cards with him. After the baking was over, he performed tricks for us -- one of which called for one of us to select a card, replace it, and then watch as he tossed the deck in the air. I will never understand how, but one card out of the fifty two stuck to the ceiling of my living room as the rest of us sat, holding our pie plates, too awestruck to speak. Three years later, the two of clubs remains on my ceiling.

In the twelve years since my mother's death, I have probably taught a few hundred men and women how to make pie crust. For some I know, the pie we made at my house was probably the only pie they'll ever make. Others tell me they're pie-makers now. Some have even passed on my mother's lessons to other friends. I like to think of that as a small form of immortality for her: that all over America and maybe beyond, pie makers are scattering Minute Tapioca on their bottom crust and taking care not to overhandle the dough, thanks to Fredelle Bruser Maynard.

But I also know the legacy of my mother's pie has to do with more than learning how to make a flakey crust. In the years since her death -- which have also been the years since the end of my marriage, and since I laid to rest the dream of one particular kind of happy family -- I've learned some things myself. One is that happy families come in a variety of configurations. Sometimes there's a mother and father, married to each other. Sometimes there isn't. A tradition can be carving the Thanksgiving turkey with extended family gathered round the table, eating off the best china. But it can also be twenty complete strangers, gathered in my kitchen, with flour in their hair and apple peelings flying, rolling out pie crust and telling stories of their lives. You can reach your mother on the phone, if you're lucky. In my case, I take out six tart apples, a half stick of butter and a half a cup of Crisco, three cups of flour, salt, sugar, cinnamon, ice water and a trusty red box of Minute Tapioca. Then I make a pie.

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