1. Dr. Smucker’s Thrice-Performing Chastity Pants: Now With Toasting Compartment
2. Strategic placement of fennel bulbs behind the ears, according to the Swiss Gendarme Method
3. A simple cockle broth. Fresh out? Substitute pennies.
Dear Rennie,
You know how in middle school, you’re hoping to not be the one girl in the group of girls that makes the other girls look good? But, it can be, like, super hard to tell? I need a way to know. Something more certain than skinny jeans, and way more definite than daikon in my lunch, because let’s face it, just about anyone can get those these days. Please, help! There’s a pool party coming up at Tina D’Amicco’s, and I have to know before I wear that bikini!
Sincerely,
Nervous Elle in West Bromley
People do not go to Disneyland specifically to dine, but they do go to Disneyland—in droves that remind one of the curve that plots population density against violence and cannibalism—and they must be fed. If they were not fed, they would grow impatient and disillusioned while queuing thirty-five minutes to sit in a spinning teacup for nineteen seconds. Disbelief would fail to be suspended. No one would pay fifty cents for a squashed penny, or $12.85 for a blinking Tinkerbell scepter that the TSA will inevitably confiscate (and perhaps use as an excuse to make you poop into one of those clear toilets).
Darwin makes dinner,
And it’s not as complicated as it seems.
Time passes insistently
In his kitchen of stone and oak–
The hearth stoked, the knives
Always sharp.
His ingredients stalk one another
Across the table tops;
Wait in ambush behind earthen jars;
Growl and
Hiss and
Chirp and
Call in the pantry.
Darwin’s dinner
Selects itself, naturally.
The least fit is best for him.
He does almost no work
(aside from warming the oven
And collecting the cutlery).
He places in a pan
The mangled and extinct;
The mate-less and exhausted;
The too easy prey perhaps still gasping
On his counter.
He plucks mammal and invertebrate
From his plate,
Without prayer of mastication–
Swallowing elaborate swallows
(not incautiously).
Darwin’s dinner
Tumbles down his mighty throat
As he wipes his beard with an errant sleeve.
(In the end, the dishes scattered in the sink,
Are a string of clinking islands.)
The origins of the word “pie” are as murky as the midnight waters of the Dagoba System, but, the general consensus seems to be that our modern definition stems from the word ‘magpie’–the implication being that the contents of the pastry are as varied and disparate as the scraps found in a magpie’s nest. I’ve yet to find the ribbon of a cassette tape hanging out in a pastry envelope alongside a huckleberry, but, here at the Farmer General, we’re discovering that there are plenty of other equally confounding pie ingredients that have been lost to the ravages of time and far sexier seasonal components.
Let’s start with vinegar.
Vinegar pie. It’s not a name that sings off of the page, promising tender crust and sweet interior. And it’s not a name that you see gracing any sort of list being made by a mainstream food publication when they’re trotting out that tired summer trope of “classic American desserts” or “twenty crowd-pleasin’ picnics”.
A little research into pioneer cuisine however, proves that there could be, perhaps, no pie more American than one involving the soured by-product of last fall’s apples. As long as we’re going to ally our national identity with that of our wagon-bound forbears, and to celebrate ourselves as a country of innovators tested by adversity, honed by hanging from bootstraps, then, we owe it to this pie to get over our love affair with the rosy cherry. It’s time, friends, to hunker down in the dust of the prairie with a pie of vinegar.
That’s what I can say, now, having baked two. When I showed up at Onstad’s, sweaty and ferrying recipes, I felt glad that we had more on the dinner docket than two rounds of vinegar pie, and that the sun was out in Portland for the first time in weeks.
I was armed with two contenders—the first, from the “Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook” (circa 1950), and the second, from the not-so-antique Gourmet online archives, whose author assured me that this recipe was all but plucked from the bony hand of a long-dead pioneer. My money, in terms of tastiness, was on the Gourmet entry, but, for authenticity, was in the arms of the yellow-covered cookbook, whose dimensions were roughly that of a doorstop-heavy meatloaf. If you can’t trust a book that smells like libraries and gin, (whose pages had also yielded a stained napkin from a defunct railroad) whom can you trust?
The stage was set. In short order, flaky pie dough was chilling in two tightly bound packets in the fridge. Cocktails were being consumed that paid homage to both contributors—homemade strawberry wine, cold as though plucked from a willow-shaded creek, and craft-brewed local beer, as au courant as pine filled dining pillows. After an hour of waiting, twenty or so minutes of dough-wrangling and par-baking with beans, it was the vinegar hour.
We’d chosen to divide and conquer—I was going to handle the Berolzheimer version, Onstad was going to man the prairie. From the outset we were intrigued by both the brevity of the ingredient lists, and the differences in preparation techniques. This was a pie that had been invented out of necessity—something that promised fruitiness in the dead of winter, when all fresh produce was scarce in the cellar of your sod home, and the natives were restless for something sweeter than a potato. Both fillings were of the cooked kind—mine in a double-boiler, the other directly in the pot (and both, mid-process, bore no small resemblance to bodily fluids). The ingredient lists were no more complicated than a few tablespoons of flour, a dab of butter, some sugar, water, and that all-important namesake, vinegar (in this case, apple cider). My pie also included cinnamon, allspice, and cloves, whose addition seemed rather expensive for the pie’s humble origins, but, welcome in that they seemed to up the chances of the pie tasting like something other than a cleaning solvent. We eyed Onstad’s recipe suspiciously—eggs, vinegar, and sugar, cooked together in a method not unlike that for lemon curd. My roux-esque mixture, once assembled, was equally dubious, and quivered its way into the pie shell with no small amount of Sally Struthers jiggle. The general unspoken thought was that we might’ve just made hobo-curd, and that the night would see us using it to kill the grout mold that lurked in my bathroom.
A few hours and a batch of tarragon whipped cream later though, all I can say is that the pies were a revelation. Again and again, the most common exclamation from our test crew was ‘are you SURE there’s no fruit in these?’ When they’d emerged, humbly, from the oven, still wobbly in their newness, there had been a fresh round of skepticism. This one smelled like wet dog. That one smelled like Christmas but had the disturbing hue of industrial carpeting. We might want to fortify ourselves with more onion dip first. But then, oh then, when they’d both been cut, plated, and tasted, the surprised hush that descended must’ve been as sweet to us as it had been to the pie’s originator. “Hey. You know. This is…good.”
The spiced pie was tart and fragrant with apple, redolent of orchard tang and smooth like strained fruit butter. Its warm, wintery sweetness sang against the rich crust, and its custard texture was shot through with the brightness of new fruit, despite the lack of any real fruit in the recipe. Its Gourmet prairie cousin, baked in a tart pan, was palely golden, a sophisticated looking entry whose smooth filling was sweet and acid, like a pinch and a kiss. It was lemon curd without the lemon, and a flavor unlike anything I’d tried in a pie. We kept eating bites of it, enjoying the slight sharpness with the grassy tarragon whipped cream, thinking that in short order, we could launch a Sod Cuisine revival on the strength of this pie alone.
And that was the thought that lingered, as the day went down to dusk, as the solar lanterns flickered on in the trees, as the pies slipped across our palates. America is nothing, if not the story of endless reinventions and revivals. Pioneers re-imagined vinegar as dessert blooming in the dead of winter—and here we were, eating the fruits of those inventions, everything new again, the bright flavors anything but lost.
Vinegar Pie
2 tablespoons butter
½ cup sugar
3 tablespoons flour
2 tsp. cinnamon
½ tsp. ground cloves
½ tsp. ground allspice
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
1 cup water
1 9” pie crust that had been briefly baked (about 3 minutes) at 450 degrees
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter and sugar. Sift together flour and spices then add to flour mixture, mix well. Beat in egg, vinegar and water. Pour into a double boiler and cook over boiling water until thick. Pour into the pie shell and bake about 30 minutes or until a knife comes out clean.
Pioneer Vinegar Pie
1 egg
1 heaping tablespoon flour
1 c sugar
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat ingredients together and add 1 tablespoon of sharp vinegar and a cup of cold water. Flavor with a little nutmeg (optional) and pour into an unbaked pie shell (or, you can do as we did, and press the unbaked pie shell into a tart pan for a thinner, crisper crust). Bake for an hour.
Hard of hearing?
Say what now?
Fear not, noble subject. Queen Elizabeth I has the following advice to offer:
“Bake a little loaf of bean flour, and being hot rive it in halves, and into each half pour three or four spoonfuls of bitter almonds; then clap both halves to your ears at going to bed… and keep your head warm.”*
Pfft, doctors. Forsooth!
Should you care to experiment with the internal application of almonds, as opposed to clapping them over your ears upon retiring, we suggest having a go at making Maids of Honour, as the kitchen of Sir Roger North did at a luncheon for Her Majesty in the summer of 1578. (They also made ‘Neat’s Tongue Roasted with Rhenish Wine’, but, the test kitchen is fresh out of Neat).
(*sourced from the excellent Horizon Cookbook, ed. by Wendy Buehr)
Maids of Honour
1/2 pint whole milk
2 tablespoons fine dried bread crumbs
4 ounces of butter, melted
2 ounces finely ground almonds
1/4 cup sugar
3 large eggs
lemon, zested (i.e. peel of 1 lemon finely grated)
2 dozen round puff pastry shells, 1-2 inches in diameter
powdered sugar
In a saucepan, over medium heat, combine the milk and bread crumbs. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from the heat and let stand for 10 minutes. In a mixing bowl, combine the bread mixture, butter, almonds, sugar, eggs, and zest. Mix well.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Fill each pastry shell with a tablespoon of the filling. Place on a baking sheet and bake until golden, about 12 to 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool completely. Garnish with powdered sugar and serve.
Recipe adapted from The Good Fare and Cheer of Old England by Joan Parry Dutton, appearing courtesy of the Gode Cookery Email Group.
At some point in the career of the truly ambitious culinary professional, there arrives a luminous moment of epiphany in which it becomes abundantly clear that both personal development and advancement in the field will require some travel. This is especially true if you’re an ambitious culinary professional in the relatively isolated and oddly underexposed culture of the United States, a vast land with one foreign country as a neighbor (Canada does not count).
In the hot anticipation of proposed domesticity, in the warm condescension of love, linen napkins are purchased with partner, unthinking, in the aisles of a Target superstore.
Bread — quite possibly the quintessential food the world over, one of the most fundamental parts of the diet of people on every part of the globe. It is believed the ancient Egyptians were the first bakers, the first loaf possibly discovered when some porridge got left out too long. Wild yeast in the air or on the grain itself caused it to ferment, and when Akbar accidentally dropped the sludge onto a stone in the fire, voila — primitive bread. Granted, the story is a bit far-fetched, but incredible shit happens every day.
Pies that are named for people run the unfortunate risk of sounding as though that person has been tucked tidily away behind the crust itself—a posterity turducken of sorts, a homemade mausoleum that shows up, calling card at the ready, on your sideboard.