Everybody Wants Pie in My House

Everybody wants pie in my house. Me, the kid, and even the fictional characters currently living with us. It’s spring, and the markets are gearing up. We went to a new neighborhood market this morning that is waving the local, sustainable flag and tasted our way around the store. I brought home a couple of Mexican Mocha soft biscotti from Deda’s Bakery. This is on the tag: “We believe in the liberal use of butter, cream, sugar, and eggs. We believe in generous amounts of frosting.” It gets better from there. I’ve tasted their biscotti and they do believe in butter. I may not be able to eat for the rest of the day but that’s okay. I’m in the camp that would rather eat two biscotti laden with butter and sugar, and then eat nothing but snap-peas until my blood sugar levels off. The other camp is the one where biscotti are gluten free, cholesterol free, salt free, sugar free. And you can have more than one a month.

I could argue either side of the fence. My stand is strictly because I adore the way good food tastes. I get really excited about a new Basque sheep’s milk cheese. I mean, really excited. Such as the new sheep’s milk cheese I have just tasted from the Black Sheep Creamery. Like, Oh. My. God! And now I am thinking about a nice, golden Riesling to go with, and I passed a winery the other day that seems to mean business with their Riesling. But let me get a grip--we were talking about pie.

I have my grandmother’s pastry thing. I don’t even know what it’s called, but it’s a little hand tool for mixing flour with butter and lard, a wooden handle, and attached are wire loops that look like a rainbow. My mother used this to mix flour with Crisco, but my grandmother used Sno White Lard. This lard and flour was used as a base for gravy, which went with every meal. Also biscuits and pie crusts. There might have been fancier pastries but that generation was a poor family with a lot of kids, so we stuck to biscuits and pie crusts.

I haven’t made my own pie crusts in years, and I don’t know that I have ever cooked with lard. But when I lived out with the Navajo, I ate lots of food with lard. Frybread was cooked in lard. Pastry was made with lard. Ditto refried beans. Piecrusts made with cold butter and lard together are the lightest, flakiest, most delicate piecrusts in the world. I say that as a foodie who has eaten way too much sheep’s milk cheese today, along with my biscotti from Deda’s, enough so I will be on snap-peas for the rest of the weekend and well into next week.

The characters in The General and the Horse-Lord are in a second book I am currently writing. This is a bit of an anomaly for me, because I usually am finished with characters and move on- but novels leave a lot of room to explore, and these guys are still living in my house, talking about pie. They start to talk about sex, but since they are walking the streets of Albuquerque, and they are not the kind of people to talk about sex in public, they have to turn their conversation to lard.

Gabriel reached down, captured his hand and held it against his warm skin. “This is how you touched me for the first time. And I could tell by your face you were trying hard to resist me. That’s why I peeled out of my flight suit right in front of you. I wanted to give you every assistance.”

“It was appreciated. I know where we can get some pie.”

“Mannie’s?”

John nodded. “They use lard in the crust, along with butter. I wish I didn’t know that, but now I do I can taste why they have the best piecrust outside of Navajo land. One of the cooks is Navajo. She told me if I wanted a piece of real fry bread, she’d drop a piece for me into bubbling lard. That’s how she said it, too, bubbling lard, and for some reason it sounded good, fry bread cooked in lard.”

“We both need to get our cholesterol checked,” Gabriel said, and took his hand. “We split one piece of pie, now I know about the lard, then back home to our salads. I remember when I was a kid, watching my grandmother make tortillas with corn masa and warm water and a little bit of lard. I loved those tortillas. I’d sit at the table and she would cook a bunch over the griddle, and every batch she’d slide me one hot off the stove.”