Making Piece

Instead of using my nimble fingers to type emails to the coworkers sitting in the cubicles right next to me, I put my hands to use, making something tangible and mouth-watering to be savored and appreciated by others. Just as my dad taught us kids to moan with pleasure over each bite of banana cream pie, I relished the joy with which my pie-loving customers, rich and famous or not, consumed my homemade pies.

My transition from my workaholic life in San Francisco to pie baking in Malibu was surprisingly seamless. Upon my return to L.A., I discovered a new gourmet-food shop had opened in Malibu. The place was called Mary’s Kitchen and an article in the local Surfside News claimed it was known for its outstanding pie made by the café’s namesake, Mary Spellman.

Mary was a transplant from the Hamptons in New York, where she had run the Sagaponak General Store. She had been persuaded by a customer-turned-investor to move West.

And now, in the Cross Creek Shopping Center (your basic L.A. strip mall), wedged between a Starbucks and a swimwear boutique, here she was. The front of her shop was decorated with picket fencing and picnic tables covered in vintage flowered cloths. Entering through the screen door, you were met by the hot deli section displaying a plethora of comfort food—meatloaf, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese with the emphasis on the cheese. In the cold deli section, there were countless wedges of white, yellow, blue, gooey and hard cheeses, and an endless row of salamis hanging from the ceiling. In the bakery section, brick-size brownies, cookies as big as dinner plates and zesty-looking lemon bars radiating with California citrusy sunshine all beckoned. There was a lot of good food. But there was no pie.

On my scouting trip, I inquired of the elegant blonde woman working behind the counter, “Where’s the pie? I read that you have great pie.”

She nodded and asked me to wait. “Let me go check with Mary.”

A woman emerged from the kitchen in back, rounding the corner from behind the hot deli case. A six-foot-tall Amazon in a baseball hat, wire-rimmed glasses, black-and-white-checkered chef’s pants and a white apron smeared with various representations of whatever she had been cooking—this was Mary. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“I came for pie,” I said. “But you don’t have any.”

“We’re too busy to make it,” she replied in a brusque Long Island accent. Her voice was as powerful as her presence.

My response popped out like a premature champagne cork. “I’ll make it for you,” I said. When I had quit the dot com job and told my bosses I wanted to make pie, I originally intended the statement to be a symbolic one. I hadn’t actually thought it through. But the opportunity magically presented itself, the genie was here to grant my wish. (Note to self: watch it on the subliminal wishes; they’re always the most powerful ones.)

Mary stifled a chuckle. “What are your qualifications?” she wanted to know, sizing me up to see if I was serious. I hadn’t seen the moment coming, but when it arrived, I realized just how serious I was.

“I’m from Iowa,” I answered. I couldn’t say I was a web producer or a freelance journalist to get this job. “I come from the land of pie.” She just stood there, arms folded across her bosom. So I blathered on. “Actually, I learned how to bake from a pastry chef, a retired merchant marine. He taught me how to make apple pie when I was caught stealing apples from his tree.” Yes, I am fully aware that sometimes I can be a complete bumbling idiot.

“Okay,” she said with the hint of a smile. “Come back tomorrow and we’ll see how you do. Be here at one. Oh, and the pay is $7.50 an hour. Are you okay with that?”

Seven-fifty an hour? To bake pie and not sit in front of a computer sixteen hours a day? To work in a bustling, cozy kitchen by the sea instead of a cavelike cubicle in a hermetically sealed high-rise? Yes, I was totally okay with that.

Looking back, however, I admit it was a miracle that I lasted beyond the first day in Malibu. In spite of all those pies I’d made for boyfriends, I was very much out of practice. Or, in reality, my pie-making skills weren’t that polished in the first place. But Mary was an outstanding teacher.

When I showed up for my Malibu pie audition, Mary walked me over to what would be my work station, a small fluorescent-lit room off to the side of the kitchen packed with refrigerators, an industrial-size Hobart mixer, two convection ovens and a stainless steel table with flour and sugar bins stored underneath. A shelf above the table held a stack of dog-eared, stained cookbooks, and another shelf held a disarray of measuring cups and spice jars. The space was so tight you could almost stand in the middle and touch each appliance without moving.

“Let’s see what you can do,” Mary announced.

I froze. I hadn’t actually made a pie in … Oh, shit, I had no idea when I had made my last pie.

“Let me show you how I do it,” Mary said when it became clear by my catatonic state that I needed help. I stepped aside. She held a two-cup measuring cup in her bear-paw-size hands and scooped out flour into a gray tub, the kind normally used for bussing dishes. I counted along with her as she dumped twenty-two level cupfuls into the tub.

“I learned to bake pies from my mom,” she said, as she pulled several pounds of butter out of the fridge. “She ran a boardinghouse in the Hamptons and cooked for all the guests. Pie was her specialty. She made pies of every kind—coconut cream, chocolate cream, lemon meringue, blackberry, blueberry, peach, apple, you name it.”

She turned back to the refrigerator and pulled out a plastic bag full of something hard, white and greasy—like Crisco, only denser. “This is lard,” she explained when she saw the puzzled look on my face. “My mom used lard. Some people don’t like it, but that’s how we do it here—half butter, half lard.”

Using her bare hands, Mary worked the butter and lard into the flour. My eyes grew wide. “You use your hands?” I asked. “The merchant marine chef taught me to use knives.”

“Hands work better,” she said. “You work the fat into the flour with your fingers until you have the consistency of large peas.” She talked as she mixed. “This is enough dough for ten pies. We’ll just make one now, but you’ll use the rest of the dough later.” Next, she poured ice water into the flour mix. “The key here is to be light and gentle,” she said. Though there was nothing light and gentle about Mary physically, from the way her hands moved through the dough, it was obvious she possessed a tender, loving side. She lifted the flour from underneath, letting it fall from her fingers to let the water blend in without forcing it.

“Don’t overwork the dough. That’s the biggest mistake people make. They knead it too much. Remember, we’re not making bread. Pie dough only needs to be worked enough to hold it together. You work it too much and it gets tough.” She formed her soft dough into balls, patted them into discs the diameter of cup saucers, then stacked them up next to the tub. She sprinkled flour on each to keep them from sticking together.

“Can you hand me the rolling pin?” she asked, pointing a flour-covered finger toward the corner of the table. Three rolling pins of varying sizes competed for space in a large ceramic crock jammed full with other baking utensils—wooden spoons, rubber spatulas, metal spatulas, lemon graters. “The big one,” she said.

She moved the tub aside and sprinkled the table with flour. “Make sure you have a clean surface to start. The flour will keep the dough from sticking. The same goes for your rolling pin. You want to keep it clean. If the dough gets gunked up on it, scrape it off with a knife. You can also rub your rolling pin with flour.” She sprinkled flour on the top of her dough and started rolling. “Only roll in one direction, starting from the middle and working outward. Don’t roll back and forth. People like to do that and it makes the dough tough.”

As her dough began to flatten, she paused. “Now you want to turn your dough. Lift it up like this.” She demonstrated by picking up the now thinner and wider disc and flipped it over as if it were a pizza. While the dough was still airborne, she quickly ran her hand underneath, dusting the table with more flour. The dough landed on its opposite side, she sprinkled the new top side with flour, and went back to rolling. Her big hands worked quickly, expertly, and yet gently, until the dough was thin, flat and covering most of the table. “My mom had a striped vinyl tablecloth on her kitchen table. We rolled right on it and you would know your dough was thin enough when you could see the red lines through it.”

I leaned over and tried to picture the red lines. As it was, the stainless steel table had no markings to indicate her dough had passed the test, but after many years of pie making she instinctively knew when to stop.

“Do you see these white-and-yellow dots in here?” Mary asked, pointing to an irregular marbled pattern in the flattened dough. “That’s a good thing. You want that. That’s the butter and lard and it will melt into the flour as it bakes. It’s what gives your pie crust the flakiness.”

“That’s good to know,” I said. “My crust has a tendency to be a little hard.”

“That’s because you overwork the dough,” Mary responded.

“Yes. A friend of mine from Iowa, whose 104-year-old grandmother wrote a cookbook, accused me of that. Whenever we make pie together, she yells at me, ‘Don’t manhandle the dough!’”

“We’re going to make apple today. I’ll show you a shortcut that I learned from my mom. We’re going to put this crust in the pie plate now and leave it there. We’ll roll out the top later, when we’re ready for it.” Dough overflowed from the plate, draping over the edge of the dish and onto the table. Mary noticed me examining its droopy excess.

“I’ll show you how to deal with that,” she said, and came back with a large pair of scissors. “You can use a knife to trim it, or you can just use these.” She snipped at the dough with the confidence of a Beverly Hills hairdresser until she had gone all the way around the pie plate. “Leave an extra inch from the rim because we’re going to need it when we put on the top.

“Okay, Pie Girl. Are you ready to peel some apples?” Mary motioned to the boxes of Granny Smiths stacked up in front of the refrigerator. “Here, take a knife and have a seat.” She handed me a paring knife and grabbed another one for herself. We sat on milk crates in the middle of the tiny baking room with a giant silver bowl between us. I picked up an apple and started to cut out the stem. “You don’t have to do that. Leave the stems and I’ll show you the shortcut I was talking about when we’re done peeling.”

I took a breath and moved my knife around the apple, the waxy green skin coming off easily with the sharp blade. “I guess my knives at home must be pretty dull,” I said. “This one is working really well.” I put my one skinned apple into the bowl, next to the four Mary had already peeled, and started in on another.

“One pie takes about seven or eight of these large apples,” Mary explained as we filled the bowl. “Now here’s what I want to show you—the shortcut.” Taking an apple in her mama-bear hand, she sliced the apple directly into the pie shell.

“Don’t you slice the apples into a bowl and mix them together with the sugar and cinnamon?” I asked. “That’s what that old pastry chef taught me.”

“No, that’s the way most people do it, but this is what my mom taught me. It’s easier and faster this way. Make sure you slice them all the same size so they cook evenly. You don’t want them too small or they’ll bake down too fast. And if they’re too big, they won’t bake through. We’re going to put in half of the apples and half of everything else—sugar, cinnamon, pinch of salt and enough flour to thicken the juice—and then repeat it.”

She sliced, sprinkled and pinched. Then, just as she promised, she sliced more apples and dumped the remaining half of the other ingredients on top. “Don’t worry. It will all blend together as it bakes.” Reaching for a stick of butter, she cut off an inch and placed it on top of the apple pile. “Don’t forget a pat of butter before you lay the top crust over it.”

“That’s a lot of apples,” I commented on the slices stacked up into a mountain peak.

“You don’t want to be stingy, but you also don’t want your apples too high because they will shrink as they bake. The crust will stay high, and you don’t want to be left with a big gap underneath.” She rolled out another ball of dough until it was flat, round and a few inches wider than the pie plate.

“To pick up the dough you can fold it in half like this.” She lifted an edge and slowly brought it to meet its opposite side, ending up with a half-moon shape. “Or you can use the rolling pin by pulling the dough onto it and move it over to your pie.” She lifted the half-moon by its edges and dragged it over to the waiting pie without breaking it. She lined it up with the center and unfolded it, until it laid flat across the fruit-filled heap.

My previous pies never had that kind of excess dough hanging off the sides, nor had I ever managed to roll my dough as smooth as hers. My pie dough was always cracked and crumbly with jagged edges that barely reached the edge of the pie plate. My dough required an all-star wrestling match to get the top and bottom crusts to join together. But this pie already looked like a masterpiece—the outline of apple wedges visible, snugly tucked under their supple blanket of dough. And she wasn’t finished with it yet.

“I’m going to trim the edges.” Again, she grabbed the scissors and cut with abandon, trimming the overflow. She measured her progress by poking her finger under the rim of the pie plate. “We’ll leave about a fingertip’s worth of dough. Now we pinch the top and bottom crusts together to seal in the juices.” Her fingers raced around the perimeter, thumb and forefinger on one side, pushing the side of her index finger in between them from the other. The dough elevated with each pinch, creating a fortress from which no pie filling could ever escape. There would be no dripping of apple juice into her oven. The end result was a decorative fluted edge.

“Before it goes in the oven …” Mary stopped midsentence and said, “Will you make sure that top oven is set to 450?” I walked over and turned the knob. “Before it goes in the oven,” she continued, “we need to brush it with a beaten egg.” She painted the top crust with egg, using a small brush until it was shiny and yellow. “But don’t overdo it. You don’t want egg collecting in the little troughs. And now we poke holes in the top for the steam to vent.” Picking up her paring knife again, she said, “My mom always made this pattern, sort of like chicken feet and, because she’s a Christian, a little cross in the middle.” She punctured the dough until it was covered in slits, a set of chicken footprints that lined up as if marking where to cut the pie into quarters.

“Open the oven for me, will you?” I opened the door and got hit with a blast of industrial-strength hot air convection. She slid the pie inside. “We’ll set the timer for twenty minutes, enough time to set the crust. You want the crust to cook first, get it a little brown, then turn the temperature down to 375.”

Not caring any longer if I sounded like a novice, I asked the classic “Pie Baking for Dummies” question: “How do you know when it’s done?”

“You stick a knife in it. You want the apples to be soft, but still have a little resistance. If you overbake it, the apples will come out mushy, like applesauce. But you want to bake it until the juice bubbles, so you know the fruit is cooked.”

After twenty minutes, sure enough, the edges and top had transformed from white and doughy to brown and crusty. “We’ll turn down the temperature now and leave it in for another thirty or forty minutes.”

Time passed much faster in the crammed and hot kitchen than in my dot com cubicle. “Here, stick the knife in and see what you think,” Mary said when the timer went off. The knife gave way beneath my touch.

“I would say it’s done.” Even though the knife went in easily my confidence was tentative.

She took the knife from me to see for herself. “Yes, you’re right. It’s done.” She pulled out the commercial-size baking sheet upon which the pie sat. The pie. The gorgeous, golden brown, sky-high apple pie. Steam rose from its vents, bubbling juices pooled in the crevices of the fluted edge, the familiar sweet apple-cinnamon-butter scent filled the kitchen.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. I didn’t want to point out the one flaw I observed, but I couldn’t help but ask: “Do you think we should cut off that one edge that got a little darker than the rest?”

“No,” she snapped. “That’s part of this pie’s personality. Every pie is going to look different. Pie should look homemade.”

Pie should look homemade. What a concept. A pie made by hand will never be perfect, but it will be real. You will know that someone crafted it with their hands, putting their own unique signature on it the way an artist signs their name on a canvas. I leaned over the steaming vents to breathe in the apple and spice, a soothing, heartwarming scent I never, ever tire of.

With Mary’s mentoring, I found my way back into a healthy world again and, as a bonus, I perfected my pie-making skills.

I went on to bake some two thousand pies over the course of that year. I baked strawberry-rhubarb pies for Dick Van Dyke. I made coconut cream pies for Steven Spielberg. I watched Mel Gibson wolf down a slice of my apple crumble pie. I sold more than one peach pie to Robert Downey, Jr. And once, on a tight deadline, I whipped up a lemon meringue pie for Barbra Streisand, who had ordered it for a dinner party. (That pie, however, didn’t survive the trip to her house. Her driver took the speed bumps in Malibu Colony too fast and the meringue stuck to the top of the bakery box.) The biggest challenge came at Thanksgiving, when I pulled an all-nighter, baking two hundred pecan, pumpkin and apple pies in a twenty-four-hour stretch to fulfill all the customer orders, leaving me with sore muscles, swollen hands and bakers’ burns on my forearms. I still bear the scars proudly.

CHAPTER 5

It was because of this lifelong pie history—and the ease with which I had landed the pie-baking job in Malibu—that I assumed I could approach the bakeries and coffeehouses of Portland and have a job nailed down within a few days. And so, two months after Marcus’s life ended and my grief began, I set forth on my jobseeking mission.

Portland may be renowned for its food scene—its socially conscious cafés supplied with locally grown produce and free-range, hormone-absent meat, its proliferating gourmet food carts and its frequent glowing reviews in the New York Times—but at the time, Portland did not have any pie shops. Still, it had decent pie. Not mind-blowing-delicious pie, but there was pie all the same. And pie is what I needed. Like a gardener savors digging their bare hands in the earth, drawing energy from holding a clump of root-bound soil between their palms, I needed pie dough. I needed to bury my hands in flour and butter to evoke that grounding, energizing sensation. I made a list of the places where I would apply: Crema, Random Order Coffee House, Bipartisan Café, Grand Central Bakery, Baker and Spice. Out of five places, I was sure to get a job. After all, I was highly qualified.

At least by my definition I was qualified. Granted, it had been eight years since I worked at Mary’s Kitchen. But I had spent a full year there making pies, and my on-the-job training had to be as valuable as a culinary school certificate.

If my pies passed the test from Hollywood’s A-list celebrities, I was certain my pies would hold up to Portland’s precious culinary standards.

First, I applied at Crema, a hip little bakery in Portland’s northeast quadrant. I was attracted to the contrast of wholesome, hearty baked goods—scones, muffins, cupcakes and pie—sold in an ultramodern glass-front building with concrete floors. It’s what Marcus would call a “style-mix.” In truth, I went to Crema first because it’s a place Marcus and I liked. He had taken Alison there for a thank-you breakfast just days before he died. She told me about it later, about their conversation, about how sad he was over our divorce. I still had the receipt from their breakfast, which I found in his wallet, along with the other sales slips that tracked the movements of his final days. Even when I was not conscious of it, everything I did, everywhere I went now, was motivated by staying connected to Marcus.

I approached the twentysomething dude with the plug-pierced ears and scraggly beard behind the cash register. “Oh, man, sorry, we’re not hiring,” he said. “But you can leave your number.”

I didn’t scribble my number on the scrap of paper he offered. I left my card. I had come a long way since my baking days in Malibu. I took pie so seriously now I had a business card printed with “The World Needs More Pie” as my company name, complete with a red-and-white-checkered border and a steaming pie logo on it. Crema’s manager was sure to call me back. Not only was I professional in my approach, I was perfect for this place. The kitchen behind the bakery counter was calling to me. I was already visualizing myself pulling my gorgeous pies out of their ovens, joking and laughing with the other bakers, making friends with the pie-consuming customers, maybe even getting this cashier dude to help me peel apples. This was a place where I could relive the good old days of Malibu. They had to call me back.

Next, I went to Random Order Coffee House about a mile farther northeast. In the heart of the Alberta Street district, Portland’s grunge strip, the predominant feature of this tiny coffeehouse was its display case of handmade pies. Not cheap by any city’s standards, their pies sold for twenty-eight bucks each. Pretending I was looking for the restroom, I poked my head into their baking kitchen in the back. It wasn’t a kitchen exactly, it was more like a closet. A very, very small closet. They were baking all those pies in a bloody toaster oven. No, we weren’t in Malibu anymore. I inquired anyway. No. Not hiring. Whatever. I left my card.

Bipartisan Café is a longer trek east, as far opposite of my Grieving Sanctuary as you could get and still be in Portland. But their pie was as good, plain and simple as a grandmother—er, in my case, great-grandmother—would make. Their specialty was Northwest berry pies—marionberry, blackberry and raspberry—all served with a giant dollop of whipped cream. From what I could tell, the pies were baked right behind the counter, a space already congested with coffee machines and their harried staff members preparing soup and sandwiches. I stayed to eat a bowl of chili—one that actually had meat in it (surprising for vegetarian-centric Portland)—and after some subtle questioning of the waitress, I learned that they might be hiring extra help for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, the baker was out of town for two weeks. I left my card.

After that, it was on to Grand Central Bakery. This was the biggest of the bunch. Grand Central Bakery was a chain started in Seattle, and had recently released an impressive new cookbook. Their wholegrain breads were sold in grocery stores, and they had started a new line of frozen pie crust and unbaked frozen pies. A burgeoning pie enterprise? They could use my help. Of their three Portland locations, the one closest to my house had a public viewing area to watch the bakers make bread in a warehouse-size kitchen. I watched. I liked. The bakers worked as a team, as one completed their task they passed the bread dough on to their coworker for another task, chatting and smiling all the while. I wanted to join in the camaraderie. I was even willing to change camps and make bread instead of pie. If they were hiring. My neighbor, Robin, worked there part-time as counter help. Even with her hand-delivering my application and putting in a good word for me, I never got a call back.

Baker and Spice, out in the suburbs, was my last resort. When I thought of getting a pie-baking job to help heal my grief, I had envisioned riding my bike to work, like I did in California. Those were heavenly days when I could pedal the forty-five minutes from Venice to Malibu along the warm and sunny coast, watching pelicans dive for fish and surfers catch waves.