An Elegant Dessert

Let's face it: pie is homey. It's comfort food, something that your grandmother could whip up and serve after a family dinner. Pie in our culture shows up on the "family" holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and 4th of July.

There are problems with elevating pie into a finer dessert. Presentation is so vitally important for high-end desserts. Cupcakes are easy to present with flair, with their ever present buttercream that is so simple to pipe attractively, and the ease of adding color and accents to the top of the cupcake. Pie, on the other hand, tends to be always presented in one way: in a wedge. It has very natural colors, which are beautiful, in a homey sort of way.

"When there are no words..."

Where I'm from, people respond to tragedy with food. There are those times in life when there's nothing you can say, nothing you can do to take the pain away from people around you. There are natural disasters, illnesses and deaths that can't be made to hurt less, that can't be explained away. You can't say, "It'll get better," because it won't. Some people respond with prayer, by sending cards, by expressing condolences, but I generally bring a pie.

About a year ago I found out that one of my co-workers was in the hospital. There were dark whispers that it was serious, maybe even life threatening. He had the best in medical care, his community rallied around him and his family. Like many of the people I work with, I did what I could to help. I brought a pie. But, pie or not, brain cancer gets most people in the end.  

Pulling Out All the Stops - Not Your Grandma's Banana Pudding Pie

"Pulling out all the stops," is a musical term. A "stop" is a piece on an organ that stops the flow of air from the bellows to the pipes. Now, the organ is, in some ways, a rather crude instrument. The ability to regulate dynamics was a function of how many pipes were sounding at any given time, because you couldn't regulate the velocity of air from the bellows. So when an organist wanted to really crank the instrument up and let 'er rip, they pulled out all the stops, allowing the air flow to reach every pipe, generating a lot of noise. Hopefully the organist's skill matched his enthusiasm.

On this pie, you are truly pulling out all the stops. Believe it or not, there are times when I look at a recipe and think, "I could use 1% milk here rather than whole," or "I could make do with vanilla extract, not waste time and money on a vanilla bean." And yeah, for a pie at a pot-luck, for everyday pie, you can get away with a couple of cost or fat saving techniques. But not this pie, not today.