The Man Who Ate Everything (60 page)

A hundred pies ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table, eating the filling out of yesterday’s apple pie, keeping track of the Miss Teen USA Pageant on TV, and waiting for the day’s first pie to come out of the oven.

This would be a pie from paradise, an apple pie like none other—for the luscious fruit would be tucked into the most daring and innovative piecrust of a generation, if not of all time. “Some are born great,” I murmured happily, playing Malvolio in
Twelfth Night,
“some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

I had spent weeks reading all the scientific piecrust literature published since 1921 and every recipe I could find, about two hundred in all. My aim was to reinvent American piecrust from the ground up, taking nothing at face value—neither folk techniques, old wives’ tales, or instructions purportedly based on science. And after a long string of near misses (which is why I was eating only the apple filling), I had finally, this evening, figured out a novel, modern way of making the perfect, foolproof American piecrust. It was now browning happily in my oven.

I was under colossal pressure. Marion Cunningham, daunting pie expert and a friend for many years, was coming to town! Beautiful at seventy-three, with a golden gray ponytail and sky-blue eyes, Marion lives in Walnut Creek in northern California.

She is mentor to probably half the bakers in America, through her authorship of the
Fannie Farmer Cookbook
(thirteenth edition), her indispensable
Fannie Farmer Baking Book,
her very successful
The Breakfast Book
(all published by Knopf), and countless magazine and newspaper columns. Marion is the first person I call with questions about American baking. Her patient explanations are usually interrupted by three or four pleas for help on the other line.

Marion is a calmly fanatical believer in simplicity, so I had kept my complex piecrust experiments to myself. When she arrived, I wanted to stun her with a method completely at odds with her own and demonstrate that Walnut Creek rusticity has its limits.

The objective is this: Perfect American piecrust must be seven things at once—flaky, airy, light, tender, crisp, well browned, and good tasting. The tricky ones are flaky, tender, and crisp—because these are independent virtues. Getting flaky, tender, and crisp to happen at the same time in the same pie seems nearly impossible. Yet millions of American women and men in the early 1900s could do it in their sleep, and probably tens of thousands can today. Marion is one of them.

French tart pastry is tender, buttery, and slightly crisp but possesses a compact, sandy texture instead of flaky layers. That’s fine for the French, but completely wrong for an American piecrust. In this, I think, we are unique among nations. When Jane Austen wrote, “Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness,” she didn’t say, “Flaky, tender, and crisp apple pies.” She meant some British predecessor of flaky, tender, and crisp—probably their adaptation of French puff pastry.

Savory pies were invented by the ancient Greeks and imitated by the Romans, who brought pie to Gaul. Years passed. The medieval French were great pie lovers—always meat pies, never fresh fruit—and the Normans took pie along when they conquered Britain in 1066. Huge pies—such as the one containing four and twenty blackbirds—were made with strong, thick crusts
(neither tender, crisp, nor flaky) and were used more as containers for cooking and storage. It seems incredible that nobody in the world thought of putting fresh fruit into a piecrust until the English and French did in the early sixteenth century, but there it is. Fruit pie made its first appearance in English literature in 1590 in this seductive line from Robert Greene’s
Arcadia:
“Thy breath is like the steame of apple-pyes.”

The Pilgrims brought pie recipes and rolling pins on the
Mayflower,
along with apple-tree cuttings. Neither the apple nor most other fruit trees are native to America, and pies of wild berries (the edible varieties were pointed out by the Indians) were the most common in the early years of settlement. Both pie and apples bloomed here like nowhere else in the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson, when questioned about the New England habit of eating pie for breakfast, replied, “What [else] is pie for?” By 1900, in Midwest farming areas, pie was obligatory at least twice a day. And only thirty years ago, pie was America’s favorite restaurant dessert, requested by 60 percent of all customers at every meal.

Most piecrust recipes in the first American cookbooks of the late 1700s and early 1800s resemble English formulas for puff pastry, which often included whole eggs or substituted egg whites for water; the dough was repeatedly folded and rolled, with butter added each time. But by the mid-1800s, American recipes appeared that were nearly identical to those we use today. Somehow, in the first half of the 1800s, the classic American piecrust was born and quickly spread throughout the land. I have found nothing to explain how this happened, by whom, or where. I reject the gift-from-an-advanced-alien-civilization hypothesis.

The kitchen timer beeped. I checked the pie and decided to let it brown a few minutes more. I turned back to the television. The poignancy of the bathing-suit competition was sadly drawing to a close. At this point in the Miss Teen USA Pageant, I had expected a Cherry Pie Contest, my only reason for tuning in to this antiquated and sexist ritual. I watched in vain. Wichita,
Kansas, from which the Miss Teen USA Pageant was broadcast, was once a major world capital of homemade pie. Shouldn’t today’s teen role models be as adept at pie-making as they are at concupiscent display? But now Wichita seems nothing more than the world capital of the Miss Teen USA Pageant. I would happily serve as pie teacher to next year’s contestants.

In theory, American piecrust is extremely simple. Most often it follows a three-two-one formula—three parts flour (by weight), two parts shortening, and one part water, plus a little salt and sometimes a little sugar.

Nearly every baker or scientist who writes about pie seems to subscribe to what you might call the Nasty Gluten Theory of Flaky, Tender, Crisp American Piecrust. Wheat flour is mainly starch, plus 7 to 15 percent protein and 10 percent moisture. The two main proteins are glutenin and gliadin. When you stir water into flour, the glutenin and gliadin come alive, connecting with the water and with each other to form gluten, a tough and stretchy substance that, when kneaded or stirred or stretched, forms the elastic network that gives structure to bread, but turns pastry and cakes tough and rubbery.

Piecrust recipes have you go to elaborate lengths to avoid developing gluten. They warn you to use as little water as possible (without water, gluten cannot form); to mix and handle the dough very gently (without manipulation, gluten strands cannot join into networks); to use low-protein pastry flour or all-purpose flour (which has less gliadin and glutenin); and to rest the ball of dough before rolling it out (which relaxes the stretchiness of the gluten, though it also allows the water to reach particles of flour that had remained dry and therefore without gluten).

The ingredient in piecrust that combats gluten is shortening—fat. By coating the little particles of flour, shortening waterproofs the protein, prevents the water from reaching the gliadin and glutenin, and thus makes it impossible for them to combine and form gluten. And if they do combine, shortening keeps the thin strands of gluten apart, stops them from forming sheets and
networks that run through the dough, and tenderizes the crust by ensuring that the strands of gluten stay separate and short. That is why it’s called shortening. Or so I’ve heard.

Pure fats like lard and Crisco have more shortening (tenderizing) power than butter and margarine, which con
tain 15 per
cent water and can actually activate the gluten. Soft fats, even vegetable oils, coat the flour particles easily by flowing around them. This protects them all from water but causes other problems. Fats that are solid at room temperature are less effective, unless you first cut them into infinitesimal pieces. Acids attack and weaken the elastic gluten, which is why many people add vinegar to the dough when they make pies.

All of this is aimed at achieving a tender piecrust. But what about flakiness? When you roll out pie dough, the flattened particles of shortening separate the dough into layers. The pieces of fat act as spacers. The larger they are, the wider and longer the layers they produce. Depending on how you cut the fat into the flour, the particles can range from the size of a grain of coarse meal to that of a pea or a small olive.

When piecrust is baked, the solid fats melt, leaving a gap between the layers of dough. The water in the dough begins to turn into steam, puffing the layers of dough apart. And when the dough reaches about 160 degrees Fahrenheit, the piecrust begins to set. Crispiness comes about when enough water has been driven from the dough by the heat of baking.

Lard, the rendered body fat of the pig, has a high melting point and coalesces into especially large crystals when it cools to lower temperatures. That’s why lard acts as a terrific spacer between layers of dough. Lard was once widely considered the best fat for making flaky piecrust. Crisco was introduced in 1911 as a lard replacement with a long shelf life. Nowadays, lard has lost some of its popularity because of its pork flavor (which really goes quite well with apples, pears, cherries, and peaches) and widespread nutritional superstitions (even though lard, at 43 percent saturated fat, is less saturated than butter, at 50 percent, and may come out only a little worse than a vegetable shortening like Crisco, which contains 21 percent saturated fat to begin with and 14 percent transfatty acids when it is hydrogenated to make it solid.

Which brings us back to my kitchen. My object was to get around all of this agonizing about gluten and fat, and to eliminate entirely the need for manual skill. Here is how I made the piecrust about to emerge from the oven: I followed the classic three-two-one formula, using Crisco and medium-protein all-purpose flour—totally ordinary, so far. But it was my technique that would soon astound both the baking world and Marion Cunningham. Using a food processor, I added half the shortening to all the flour and processed it like crazy, for five minutes, until it completely disappeared, coating all the little flour particles and immunizing them against what was to come—water and the threat of gluten. This technique would guarantee the tenderest of piecrusts. Next came all the water, processed briefly until everything began to form into clumps of dough. Finally, the rest of the shortening went in, briefly pulsed to leave it in pieces the size of M & M’s. These would form layers when the dough was rolled out. The expected result: perfectly tender, crisp, and flaky pastry. I turned off the Miss Teen USA Pageant, which was mired in the evening-gown competition, my least favorite part. And then the pie was ready. I allowed it to cool for ten minutes. Most pies,
both crust and filling, improve if you let them stand for two hours, until they are only slightly warm. But I needed to know now. I cut out a wedge of crust, lifted it from the apple filling, and took a bite.

It was awful, hard and compact but crumbly when it broke, spotted with black dots, greasy tasting. There wasn’t a flake in the entire thing. I had never been further from a perfect piecrust.

When I recovered from my disappointment and panic—Marion would arrive in only two days—I figured out what had gone wrong. By processing half the fat so thoroughly, I had indeed waterproofed all the flour particles and no gluten at all had developed. And as a result, there were no flaky layers for the chunky fat to separate. In furious experimentation over the next forty-eight hours, I realized that the Nasty Gluten Theory pie experts were wrong. You cannot produce a flaky piecrust without gluten! The real objective is not to eliminate gluten entirely but to get the right amount distributed in exactly the right way.

I had figured out nearly everything except how to bake a flaky, tender, and crisp piecrust. In fact, I had proved that a perfect piecrust is theoretically impossible.

I wondered if America’s giant food companies had solved the problem. I went out and bought every packaged piecrust I could find: mixes in boxes; frozen pie shells; a refrigerated, prerolled double crust; and several frozen pies. The only nearly acceptable product was the Betty Crocker mix, easy to roll out and yielding a light though mealy crust with inconsequential flakes. But using a mix saves only the three minutes you would spend assembling and measuring the ingredients—you still have to mix and roll out the dough yourself. Pillsbury’s refrigerated crust was somewhat tender and flaky, though soft and white instead of crisp and brown, and it had the repulsive, fermented taste of cheap cheese, maybe the fault of sloppy supermarket storage, maybe Pillsbury’s fault.