I Pie With My Little Eye

Ever been in a store and frozen with indecision?

Happens to me a lot, particularly in the large stores here in the States. The size of the places, the choices on offer, the quantity of ready-made stuff. It’s not as if I come from a country without such facilities and choice. But some choices aren’t on offer much in England, and it’s those things that lead me to a stuttering indecision:  which pie to get!?

Of course we do eat pies in England. But these are mostly of the savory sort –meat pies or vegetable curry pies that come encased in very thick pastry. It’s common to have one of these for lunch – only I rarely touch them unless I go to a particular bakery that makes pretty good meat and potato pies. Otherwise, pies can be pretty awful. This might not be a surprise to those who know traditional British victuals. Our food scene has greatly improved over recent years, and one reason is because British people are big cheap-flight travellers – forced, perhaps, to go out into the old empire to find something decent to eat!

Coming from an immigrant background – my folks were World War II refugees - we didn’t eat British pies at home. However, I was aware of them from childhood because of a comic book hero I loved  - Desperate Dan. He was a lovable character, physically huge, with a face covered in a seven-day stubble – if he shaved he used a blowtorch - pot bellied and thin legged. Dan started life as an outlaw but became the clumsy oaf with a big heart. He got the underdogs of life out of jams, and then he would tuck into a huge “cow” pie that had a pair of cow horns sticking through the crust. (I assumed the contents of “cow” pie to be beef.) There was also Sweeney Todd, the mythical London barber, who sliced up his customers and cooked them in meat pies! These stories had serious consequences for my relationship with pies: unless they were homemade I couldn’t trust what I’d find as innards.

Until I came here. I might need psychiatry to cure my distrust of British pies, but American fruit pies piled high with apples, peaches, blueberries, or rhubarb and strawberries – well, that’s a new world of pie eating for me. Back in the old world we would snigger at the mom-and-apple-pie image pictured in imported television shows like The Waltons or even named in films like American Pie. Since living in Connecticut, though, you might say I have had a fruit pie epiphany.

The secret is the liberal use Americans make of spices --nutmeg, mace and in particular cinnamon -- great for bringing out fruity tastes. I guess the Dutch who traded and lived around here started this craze. Like many other Europeans, the Netherlanders are not shy about sprinkling those old East Indies flavors on their food. Meanwhile, despite all their trading and ‘conquering,’ the good old Brits stuck to salt, pepper and sugar until South Asians started moving to the UK in recent years. We’re now crazy about curries from the Indian subcontinent, especially Chicken Tikka Masala, a dish the British allegedly conceived by divine intervention at an Indian restaurant, when tomato ketchup was added to a curry sauce to satisfy a drunken customer. Recent surveys show that it is now Britain’s favorite dish. But no decent pies on offer.

So, back to fruit pies in America.  My wife has a 1950s recipe book of traditional New England dishes, from which she produces a heartily spiced blueberry pie from heaven.  I knew I was hooked on it last summer, when two of her students wolfed down an ENTIRE pie in the course of a two-hour visit; I only got a teeny slice. I complained like a spoiled little kid about the injustice of it all after they left.  Now I wait anxiously for the first local June blueberries and my own WHOLE pie that I will make and I will eat. Then again, luscious, spicy strawberry-rhubarb pies are staring at me at the grocery store. And then the peach pies will follow.

 If you see someone standing by the bakery stand in a store frozen in indecision over the pies that could be me. Don’t be afraid to come up and make a suggestion, or even pass on a recipe. I don’t bite, that is providing you are not holding a spicy fruit pie encased in a light, flaky piecrust.