autumn + baking = memory
Autumn smells of cinnamon and apples, even when neither is at hand. It's just in the air. And cinnamon and apples will always call Nana to my mind.

Nana made wonderful pies. Every family gathering, there was always apple and sometimes pumpkin, or lemon meringue, or cherry, or coconut cream, depending on the season, tucked safely into old tin film reel canisters for transport. Nana also made the best oatmeal cookies and made brownies without nuts especially for me and Cousin Bryan, but it was the pies she was famous for. And the apple was everyone's favorite.

I apprenticed early in Nana's kitchen, learning about how to combine and mix and evenly distribute chocolate chips. I learned that using butter will give you different results from using shortening, and that margarine throws another wrinkle into the equation altogether. I learned how to measure ingredients, and that doubling the amount of cinnamon and vanilla called for in a published recipe almost always improves it. She had recipes, but her baking was instinctive, especially when it came to the pies. Even as a little girl who much preferred brownies to pie, I helped her, mixing the cinnamon and sugar with the apples she had peeled, putting them in the shell, dotting them with butter, and pinching the edges of the crust together. As I got older, I graduated to rolling pie crust and sometimes making pretty lattice tops, if she was feeling extra indulgent. But she always made the crust, which, as everyone knows, is the real secret of a good pie. And she never measured when she made it.

Mom came along when Nana was well into her 40s, so by the time I started college, both Nana and Papa were embarking on their eighth decade circling the sun. Nana was slowing down, baking less and starting to show some of the early signs of the Alzheimer's she would struggle with for so long. I decided that I was going to get her to show me the crust.

It was autumn, as it is now, and I was home from Columbus for the weekend. Over at Nana and Papa's I unpacked the apples I had brought (always McIntosh or Jonathan) and started peeling. I had Nana get out extra bowls for me along with the usual paraphernalia and ingredients — I had a plan. As she released each handful, pinch, slice, and sprinkle, I measured. I slipped a bowl between her gnarled hand and the target bowl and measured everything precisely. I made notes: flour 2-1/4 c + 2 T + not quite 1 t; water — ice cold; fork not pastry cutter. I tried hard to break down and quantify the ingredients and the process into something that could be preserved and perpetuated. She thought I was nuts. "You can't measure it like that," she said. "Sometimes you need a little more of this and a little less of that. It's not what it measures, but how it looks and feels." But she humored me nonetheless. After a nice, long visit, I went home with a few slices of pie and a scribble of notes. That particular pie was good, but it seemed to lack something.

It took me a long time to figure out the secret. In the stopping and starting, in the nitpicky analysis, the flow and the rhythm were lost. All of the ingredients were there, but the magic was missing. I had tried to measure the unmeasurable.

The essence of the pie is not in the precision, the number of grains of salt or drops of water, but in the time spent together over the years creating, Nana's love and patience in teaching me a skill and helping me develop my instincts.

I still bake apple pie on occasion, and I always think of Nana when I do. To this day I cannot replicate her crust, try as I might. A few years ago I stopped trying to duplicate it and developed my own recipe. The ingredients are a little different, and I prefer a pastry cutter to a fork, but in a way it's still Nana's apple pie.

Inspired by Jack. Thank you.
- posted by Lori @ 9:50:00 PM | permanent link | |