I have three quick notes before I go onto the main ramblings of the week. The first is the obligatory celebrity death note. Fred Ebb was one of the most important Broadway lyricists. Most people are familiar with at least a couple of Kander and Ebb musicals - Chicago, of course, and Cabaret. Let me put in a brief word for Flora, the Red Menace. It's flawed, but still worth listening to. I can't, alas, defend The Rink, but everyone is entitled to some lapses in judgement.
My second quick note of the week has to do with Derek Lowe, who the newspapers claim suffered a meltdown in his loss to the Source of All Evil in the Universe and who, consequently, is likely spending his last year fighting for the forces of good at Fenway. My personal theory is that he's just exercising an escape clause. We all know he sold his soul to the devil for his performance last year, but he was smart enough to put in one of those clauses that lets him out of the contract. One would, of course, prefer that he exercised the clause a few weeks later, but that's how these things go.
My final aside has to do with U.S. Airways. I got in a minor panic over the fate of my frequent flyer miles as I fear they won't make it out of bankruptcy this time. This created substantial amusement amongst my colleagues, as they saw me trying out various possibilities of places to go. The on-line mileage redemption system actually works quite nicely and I ended up booking a trip to Puerto Rico. I still have enough miles for something within the continental U.S. but haven't sorted that out yet. I suppose I ought to actually learn something about Puerto Rico in the next couple of months. My preliminary reading suggests that I want to go to Ponce.
Anyway, the main subject this week comes from my reading American Pie by Pascale Le Draoulec. She made a few trips wandering America's backroads in search of pie and wrote most entertainingly about this. I have to comment that she missed some very obvious things. One was a definite decision on her part to write only about dessert pies, so there are no quests for the perfect chicken pot pie or the like. But how on earth did she manage not to eat warm apple pie with cheddar cheese in Vermont?
More to the point, this triggered some of my personal thinking about pie. Frankly, it's a dessert type that I am hesitant to order, as I am almost always disappointed in it. Pie crust is rarely particularly interesting and most of the fillings are too sweet. There are exceptions, of course - I recall a surprisingly edible pecan pie at Chautauqua in Boulder, for example, which is all the more surprising because pecan pie is usually one of the worst offenders of sickly sweetness. But I will almost always go for something more in either the pudding or ice cream family at a restaurant. Bread pudding or creme brulee or a citrusy sorbet is mostly my speed.
I don't remember eating pie much when I was growing up, either. My mother's meal planning was quite rigid, possibly because of my father's constant diets and possibly because Mom just isn't very domestic. We always started dinner with a half grapefruit, followed by a mixed salad, followed by chicken or fish (or, less often, steak or lamb) with one starchy vegetable and one green vegetable. Dessert was almost inevitably canned fruit - usually peaches, but pineapple if we were lucky. In summer, we could be very lucky and have fresh berries. There was chocolate pudding now and then as a treat. This was made from a mix and it was a great privilege to be allowed to lick the spoon after the hot pudding was poured into glass dishes to cool. Cakes and cookies were always in the house and Mom ate them with her coffee around time for the television news, but they weren't usually eaten with meals.
Special treats showed up when it was Mom's turn to host the mah jongg ladies. But that usually meant a box of some sort of Entenmann's cake, ideally cream cheese cake. That might have been a treat, but it had a serious downside, as all of the mah jongg ladies smoked and the downstairs of our house reeked of cigarette smoke for days afterwards. The other time that special desserts showed up was when we had company. Mom would drive into town to pick up guests at the train station and the trip back to our house often included a stop at Custom Bakers.
My grandfather generally brought a box of bow tie cookies - something I don't think I've seen in at least 25 years. They were crunchy and sweet and I don't think they really tasted of anything but sugar. I think those came from a bakery in the city, though. The better bet involved my Dad's two friends from work. Roland and Lester inevitably got a pie for us for dessert. My brother and I were partial to chocolate cream pie, though I think it was really the chocolate pudding that did it for us. We ate it by eating the cream part off the top, scraping the pudding onto the plate, eating the pie crust, and finishing with the pudding. The theory was, of course, that one should save the best for last. The other possibility was nesselrode pie. This is something else I haven't seen in years and years. I recall the filling being a sort of stiff cream with odd bits of candied fruit. I remember liking it, but I don't think my brother cared much for it. Le Draoulec doesn't mention nesselrode pie at all, so maybe it's entirely extinct by now.
There was, however, a downside to Roland and Lester's visits and that was the meal that preceded the pie. Mom made one of two Jewish classics for them - either cholent or stuffed cabbage. The latter is easier to explain. You take cabbage leaves and fill them with a mixture of meat and more meat and cook this to death with raisins and tomatoes. There are actually versions of stuffed cabbage I like, but I hated this intensely as a kid. Cholent is more complicated. It exists because religious Jews don't cook on Shabbat (the Sabbath) but you're supposed to have a hot meal for lunch. The trick is to devise something that can be cooked enough to count as cooked before Shabbat starts and can continue keeping warm overnight. My Dad once told us that in Lithuania the way this worked was that every family had a sort of tag that went on their cooking pot and all the pots went into the communal oven, to be retrieved at lunchtime. Anyway, the warning sign of cholent in our house was a bowl of kidney beans soaking overnight. These got cooked with barley, onion, potato, and disgusting fatty brisket to a sort of beyond soup but not quite stew consistency. As you can tell from my description, it's the fatty boiled meat part that repelled me and I was quite amazed the first time I ate somebody else's cholent to find myself liking it. In fact, it's something I make every now and then myself, though only in a vegetarian version. I also understand something about seasoning and use lots of herbs, instead of just salt.
I suppose I should be grateful that Dad's friends didn't have a hankering for p'tcha. That's jellied calf foot and is just too vile to contemplate. At any rate, I have no idea if I actually like nesselrode pie or if I only remember it fondly as something that got the taste of Mom's cholent out of my mouth.
Copyright 2004 Miriam H. Nadel