The Man Who Ate Everything (61 page)

Then Marion Cunningham arrived, at nine o’clock on a sunny Saturday morning, in time for coffee. A gentlewoman
even under stress, she tried to seem fascinated with everything I had discovered about gluten and sympathetic to my idea that all these opposing forces make the perfect pie theoretically impossible.

Then she smiled and said, “Let’s bake a pie.” We walked a few blocks to the Union Square Greenmarket, bought three quarts of bright red sour pie cherries, returned home, and stemmed and pitted them all and prepared a delicious filling. Now for the crust.

Marion measured out two and a quarter cups of bleached, all-purpose flour (Gold Medal or Pillsbury) into a large bowl. She used a metal cup measure, scooped the flour right out of the bag, and with her free hand pressed it lightly into the cup and brushed off the excess. (Why would I mention this? Because cups of flour can range in weight from four to five ounces, depending on how you fill the cup. Measured in Marion’s way a cup weighs precisely five ounces, more than most cups of flour do but just what Marion lists on the endpapers of her
Fannie Farmer Baking Book.
It is amazing how many other pie writers warn you to measure your ingredients precisely—a teaspoon of water either way, they say, can ruin your piecrust—but then fail to tell you how they measure their cup of flour or what it should weigh. American home bakers don’t weigh their flour; Europeans do. It is a stupendous irony that twelve editions ago the original Fannie Farmer, who aimed at putting home cooking on a scientific basis, was famous for urging the American housewife to measure her flour with level cups and calibrated spoons.)

With her fingers, Marion mixed in a half teaspoon of salt, then measured out three-quarters of a cup of room-temperature Crisco and plopped it onto the flour. She tossed the shortening in the flour, breaking it up into pieces the size of walnuts. All the while she chatted happily. There was none of the grim silence that accompanies my piecrust experiments.

And then she began a hand motion that has became the basis of my own pie making. Reaching to the bottom of the bowl with both hands, Marion scooped up the flour and fat above the rim of the bowl and ran her thumbs over it, against her fingertips, from
little finger to index finger. The small pieces of fat and flour slipped between her fingers and back into the bowl and the large pieces tumbled over her index fingers. She repeated this about twenty-five times, until the pieces of fat and flour ranged in size from very coarse meal to grains of rice to green peas to small olives. The irregularity is important, as is the presence of large pieces.

Marion added a half cup of refrigerator-cold water all at once, and stirred it in a spiral pattern with a dinner fork until little clumps began to form. (She recommends adding more water rather than less if you are unsure.) She squeezed together a small handful to see if the dough adhered to itself, which it did, then pressed all the dough firmly together on one side of the bottom of the bowl, split off about half of it with her hands, and immediately rolled it out. She used my huge and very heavy wooden rolling pin with ball-bearing handles, but her touch was light and quick.

Marion had broken nearly every rule of making piecrust. She should have used chilled shortening so that it would not melt into the flour. For the same reason, she should not have used her warm fingers. She should have added vinegar to make the crust more tender, and she should never have stirred in all the water at once, but by tablespoons and then by teaspoons. Consequently, she used much more water than was absolutely necessary and didn’t distribute it very well. And she didn’t chill the dough or even let it rest before rolling it out. Through the years, Marion had tried all of these safeguards and precautions, yet none seemed to matter much. So she had simplified.

And yet, what emerged from the oven was a perfect cherry pie, or at least a perfect crust—flaky, tender, and crisp. (Something had gone wrong with my filling, and it ran all over the place.) This was the piecrust I needed to master and understand—while Marion was still in New York City.

But a day later, for reasons always unfathomable to me, Marion left New York for northern California—before I was even
close. The next two weeks were filled with telephone calls and faxes. Did she hold her hands exactly parallel to the table? Were her fingers curved or straight? Were they separated from each other or tightly closed? And most important, did she pass her thumb back and forth across her fingers each time she scooped up the shortening and flour, or just once? This last question was the subject of three phone calls.

It is Marion’s fingers that make the piecrust, not her brain. So every time I called with a question, she would hang up, make a pie or two, or just the crust, carefully observe what her fingers were doing, sometimes take notes, and report back. I held my fingers over the earpiece so that they could hear, too. She baked a dozen extra pies in all. Summer fruit in northern California was at its peak, and nothing went to waste—Marion’s friends often drop by, and twice her gardener was rewarded for working hard in the midst of a heat wave. Good piecrust is made by people with cool fingers and a warm heart, the adage says.

At long last, my own hot fingers had learned their lesson. I became proficient, and my crust was tender, flaky, and crisp. After a while, making the dough and rolling it out took only twelve minutes. I timed it. The whole process is much briefer than a trip to the supermarket.

I was committed to Marion’s method. But I wondered about Marion’s exceedingly generous attitude toward water and her practice of adding it all at once before stirring. She feels that a dry dough will break at the edges as you roll it. These splits can be repaired, but Marion finds that the dough never “bakes out” well.

I will admit to no one that I was annoyed with the perfection of Marion’s simple pie dough. But I needed to understand why it worked. And among the scientific papers I read, two helped clear up the mystery. More than that:
they were revelations.

One, from the
Bakers Digest
in 1967, demonstrated that a flaky crust is produced by a three-way sandwich between layers of flattened lumps of fat that act as spacers, layers of unprotected
flour mixed with water to produce gluten, and layers of fat rubbed into flour for tenderness. Plastic (pliable) shortening— such as room-temperature Crisco and slightly chilled lard—is a mixture of solid fat and liquid fat. The liquid part coats the flour; the solid part separates layers!!

The second paper, in the journal
Cereal Chemistry
in 1943, was a corollary of the first. It showed that when you use chilled shortening, the amount of water you add and the way you mix it are critical; but with room-temperature shortening, the kind Marion uses, these factors matter very little! So much for compulsive dough chillers.

This led me to formulate my own recipe by fiddling around with Marion’s ingredients in four ways. First, I increased the proportion of shortening so that an amateur baker like me does not have to get things exactly right. With more shortening, you can be sure that enough fat will be rubbed into the flour (for tenderness) while leaving enough over for those all-important, large, irregular lumps. And with the flour well waterproofed, the quantity of water you add becomes less critical. A technical article in the
Bakers Digest
in 1970 showed that raising the proportion of shortening—up to 80 percent of the weight of the flour— increased tenderness without decreasing flakiness at all!

This is a tactic designed for housewives who want a tender piecrust but lack the skill, sneered a male pie expert in a 1952 address to the American Society of Baking Engineers. Being accused of resembling a clumsy housewife does not bother me— I have recently discovered recipes by two very fine pie bakers who use lots of shortening. But when I get better at pie, I may reduce the fat by two tablespoons or so.

Second, I increased everything in Marion’s recipe by a third. Most recipes, especially those written by nimble-fingered women, make just enough dough to form a pie if you are perfectly proficient at rolling dough into a very thin, perfect circle. I find this extremely sexist and discriminatory against clumsier males whose cooking genius lies elsewhere. The larger volume I use
makes up for messy and irregular rolling and leaves lots of dough at the edges without the need to patch.

Third, I added a little sugar, which many other recipes also include. Marion has no objection to this. My experiments showed that a little sugar in the dough helps the crust brown and adds flavor to counteract the neutral or even slightly bitter taste of Crisco, but that too much sugar gives the crust a sandy texture (like French
sable
pastry or cookie dough), diminishes flakiness, and is cloyingly sweet.

Fourth, I changed to
unbleached
all-purpose flour, which, because it is higher in protein, is thought to produce a tougher crust. Unbleached flour has a better color and tastes nuttier; with all the shortening I added, the protein was so well coated that toughness was never much of a problem.

My adventures in pie research continued as I tested almost every subsidiary technique recommended by one pie expert or another over the past seventy-three years. In no time at all, every piece of furniture within thirty feet of my oven had been turned into a pie stand. The results:

· Brushing the bottom crust with eggs, yolks, or whites to waterproof it from a liquid filling seems to have no effect.

· Brushing milk over the top crust just before a pie goes into the oven is great for browning.

· Sprinkling sugar over the milk makes for a nice, sweet crunch.

· Greasing the pie plate helps brown the bottom crust and makes it easier to remove pieces of pie.

· Chilling a dough made entirely of Crisco produces an inferior crust with a tight structure compared with room-temperature Crisco, but unchilled lard or butter (they melt at lower temperatures) are nearly impossible to work with.

· When acidic steam rises from a fruit filling, the dough also becomes acidic. Its pH falls. Acidic dough has trouble browning. Adding baking soda was once widely recommended as a way to raise the dough’s pH and help it brown. I found that baking soda
caused a weird, reddish browning, made for a sandy texture, and left its own identifiable taste.

A recipe finally emerged. It is mainly Marion’s, of course, but it is also mine. By following it, you can make a fine piecrust with just your fingers anywhere in the world. And if you find yourself stranded on a desert island without a rolling pin, Marion says, you can use an old wine bottle that the waves have washed ashore.

Flaky, Tender, and Crisp: Handmade American Pie

Ingredients for a fruit filling (see step 1 in this recipe and the filling recipes that follow)

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (In order of preference, King Arthur, Heckers, Gold Medal, Pillsbury. Measure the flour as Marion did: scoop the flour with a 1-cup measure, press it very lightly into the cup, and level off the excess with the side of your hand. Each cup of flour will weigh
5
ounces or a little more.)

2 teaspoons granulated sugar

1 teaspoon salt

l
1
/2 cups shortening (Crisco, butter, lard, or a combination. Crisco works fine; if your kitchen is warm, chill the Crisco for 15 to 30 minutes. For better flavor, substitute 10 tablespoons [1 stick plus 2 tablespoons] cold, unsalted butter for
^l
/2 cup of the Crisco. Beat the cold butter with a rolling pin until it is pliable. Home-rendered lard cooled for 3 days—during which time it forms large crystals—and then brought nearly to room temperature is wonderfully savory and makes the flakiest and darkest crust. A lard-and-butter mixture is rich and sweet.)

3/4 cup very cold water (a little less if you use butter as part of the
shortening, because butter contains water)

1 tablespoon additional shortening, for greasing the pie plate

3 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, for the filling

1 tablespoon cold skim or whole milk, for brushing the pie

1 tablespoon granulated sugar, for sprinkling the crust

1. Prepare a fruit filling. You may use one of the recipes that follow this one, or your own. All peeling, pitting, soaking, or cooking should be accomplished before you make the crust. But the final steps—for example, the mixing of apple slices or berries with sugar—must be done at the last minute or the bottom crust will overflow with juices before the top crust has been attached. This can make for a messy pie. If you use one of my recipes for fruit filling, please read it now for instructions on timing.

2. Preheat the oven to 450° F.

3. In a large bowl (say 5- or 6-quart capacity) mix the flour, 2 teaspoons sugar, and salt with your fingers.

4. Drop the shortening onto the flour in the bowl. Toss the pieces to coat them with flour, then quickly break them up into about twelve nuggets the size of small walnuts, again tossing gently to coat, and arrange them on the flour in a rough circle about an inch in from the sides of the bowl.