This rhubarb pie was my breakfast companion for the last couple of days. Diana’s first pie of the summer, it was perfect company.
It was good enough to inspire silence, structural enough to eat out of hand, messy enough to entertain. It was, in the very best sense of the word, plain, having nothing extraneous, and lacking nothing.
A few summers ago, Diana decided that she wanted to learn to make pies, and embarked on the Summer of Pie. There have been many pies since. One of the joys of professional cooking is that you do the same thing many times, in succession, and you can literally feel yourself learning how to do it. It’s hard to recreate this phenomenon at home, but the Summer of Pie came close, and its subsequent iterations have kept her knowledge current.
But repetition matters to the eater too, because it makes each pie a chapter in a history. It lends each pie meaning which compounds with each successive crust and filling. The pie is no less quotidian, but its everydayness is lovelier each time.
Here are two newsletters you may be interested in if you enjoy this one: H.D. Miller’s An Eccentric Culinary History, and Rebecca May Johnson’s Dinner Document.
Every issue of An Eccentric Culinary History contains feats of scholarship that leave me open-mouthed, though perhaps these are table stakes to the professional historian. If you enjoy my pieces about the cost of making food, you’ll find much to like in his archive.
Johnson’s is what it says on the tin, a document of things she had for dinner (or sometimes lunch). I find it quietly and reliably uplifting, like a slice of pie for breakfast.
This entry touched me. My mom, who passed away in January, was a master pie maker. She always swore by using orange juice as the liquid in making the crust. Her absolute favorite thing was to have pie for breakfast.