377 Days - Blog #109 Pie

Tonight’s supper club theme was pie.  Yes, that meant every course from appetizer to main course to dessert was pie.  Quite a lot of pie.  I made an Italian spinach and ricotta pie for a starter, as well as some taco mini pies… but they were too much crust.

Dinner was full of many options.  There was a shepherd’s pie.  A quiche.  A French meat pie.  Mini potato (poutine) pies.  And I made a meat (pot) pie.  Dessert - because really after all that, we needed more pie - included a peanut butter chocolate ganache with pretzel crust pie, banoffee pie, fluffernutter pie, salted caramel walnut pie, Nutella pumpkin pie, and ice cream.

Good God.  That’s a lot of pie.

Anyway, all that sugar made some giddy parts of the evening.  Good company.  Good conversation.  And now a bit of a sugar crash.

But a little bit of this meat pie I made.

I decided to open up one of my great grandmother’s cookbooks.  She was a maker of pies.  My grandmother liked to tell me how Rose Alba would make two pies every Sunday – one for the house (with seven children and four adults) and one for my grandmother’s father – who often came to take those seven children out of the house on a Sunday.

The cookbooks that I assume are hers have stains and ancient caked flour on the pages with pie recipes.  I wanted to find one that she made often… but I didn’t really think my guests were going to find much appetite for a prune or apricot pie.  Plus, I figured we’d have plenty of sweet.

So I turned a few pages back to the meat section.  I’m not sure if she ever made this.  Ultimately, I chose it because it seemed pretty easy.  The hardest part would be cutting up the turnip.  It was.  Although, I forget how strong the smell of cooking lamb can be.  

What I like about recipes from this cookbook (dated as the 1930 edition) is how there is also the challenge of translating some steps into modern equivalence.  I wonder if this recipe could be done in a crock pot instead of cooking at a low temperature for two and a half hours.  Maybe.  Of course that makes me wonder what about a lifestyle was conducive to letting a pot sit in the oven for over two hours.  Would a housewife (of which my great-grandmother was not) go off to vacuum or do laundry with the early twentieth century equivalent of those devices?  Would the slow cooking heat up a kitchen or house on a November day like today without central heating?

And I do think about how my great-grandmother had moved back in with her parents.  I’m not sure when.  I’m not sure if it would have been before or after she bought this cookbook.  How old her sons were… and was it one of them… or one of her grandchildren who thought to scribble on the back page with pencil?

So many stories in a cookbook.

The pie was good.  It was dished out onto several different plates and consumed as several stories were told over candlelight.

It was a good night.