Transcending Pie

When Fear Relaxed into Gratitude

Last week I tried to write about microjoys of Thanksgiving Day while in a state of macro anxiety. It didn’t work. Martha Beck, on The Gathering Room podcast Nov. 16, explained why. In order to activate my creative right hemisphere, I needed first to be calm. But calm was out of my reach. All the self-soothing practices Beck teaches — “kind internal self-talk, being gentle and compassionate to yourself” — felt distant and useless.

Part of it was my general holiday anxiety — the cooking and baking and preparing for guests, packing away my reclusive introvert self-care routines (journaling, gratitude, walking, morning light, all the things).

But the major source of my anxiety was pie. I’ve spent weeks hiking and backpacking alone, no fear there, so my terror of making a pie may be a little out of proportion to the task.

Pie fillings are not the problem, they’re a simple matter of mixing a few ingredients, although I do remember one filling that stretched my capacity and hooked my anxiety.

Two summers ago when I visited my sister and her family, my niece commissioned me to team production of a fresh peach pie. She had found a complicated recipe with probably 150 steps, each of which had to be precisely timed and executed. The procedure was demonstrated in a YouTube video by a sprightly chef who made it all appear easy and fun.

My part of the job was the filling. Although, as I mentioned, I’m generally confident about pie fillings, this one required my concentrated attention for an entire afternoon, because the filling required at least 135 of those 150 steps. Of course, the energetic chef in the video made the filling in about 15 minutes. I move more slowly through a recipe, especially when I have to stop and rewind the video every 30 seconds to make sure I’m precisely executing each step. Luckily my niece had to go to work, leaving me alone.

She had already made the crust. Early that morning she sprinted into the kitchen in her bathrobe, pulled the flour canister, salt, and mixing bowl out of cupboards, and cut the cold butter into the flour, working it in lightly with her fingertips to make pea-size crumbs, as the 1931 classic Joy of Cooking instructs. Then she poured the crumbs onto the countertop and deftly gathered them into a tidy ball, which she rolled out with a few smooth sweeps of the rolling pin, all the while talking nonstop to me as flour softly drifted over every kitchen surface.

The baked pie was beautiful (see photo) and delicious, and it made for a successful bonding project with my niece. But it was emotionally intense for me, the latest in a decades-long series of anxiety-inducing pie events, a consequence of the drive to over-perform in the kitchen that is common to the women of my family.

The Thanksgiving of 1960 might have initiated my holiday anxiety. I was 5 and, though I don’t remember it, family photographs and the story my older brother told me have led me to some probable causes.

In 1960 my parents, 10-year-old brother, and I were living in an apartment in Phoenix. That Thanksgiving our 19-year-old sister came with her husband and their two young boys from their home in California. Our grandmother and her partner also came, and everyone stayed with us in what must have been a very small apartment.

Somehow, my mother pulled off the complex feat of managing all the folks and producing the turkey dinner with all the trimmings. I later grew up to pull off similar feats, but with microwaves and dishwashers and other conveniences my mother didn’t have.

I’m very much like my mother. She was an introvert; so am I. Probably cooking was a contemplative activity for her, as for me, though I’m sure she was faster at it. That Thanksgiving must have been wild, with all those people, including my 17-month and almost-3-year-old nephews, all crowded together.

I think that my paralyzing perfectionism over holiday productions is not about cooking or providing hospitality. (My only houseguests are my two grown kids.) It’s more about thinking of all the things I believe I have to get done in order to be okay, requirements seeded in my imagination by my early experience.

So, last week I decided to forgo my usual, last-minute search for frozen whole-wheat pie crusts, which always are sold out weeks before the holiday. I would make them myself.

I can make a pie crust. But my expert pie-making mother, who was also a full-time public school teacher, never got around to the hands-on transfer of that skill set. The few times I’ve made the dough, my inexperience — how do you get to “pea size”? how do you handle the dough “lightly” and still form it into a ball? — drove me in frustration to get the job done any which-way. My pies turned out tasty enough, but far from beautiful.

Last Thursday morning, Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S., I assumed my power stance, gave myself a pep talk, and dove in. I had found “The Best No-Fail All Butter Pie Crust” recipe at foodiecrush, and I carefully followed its instructions. That was easy to do because the instructions are detailed and descriptive: “Cut the butter into the flour mixture until there is a mixture of almond/walnut-size pieces and pea-size pieces. … Dump the mixture on the counter. It should be loose and unincorporated. Use a bench scraper to gather the crumbs into the mass of dough.”

I could do this. I didn’t bother with whole-wheat flour — I was following these confidence-building directions to the letter. When I told my hosting friend, as we set my pumpkin pie out on her buffet, that there was no redeeming nutritional value in the crust, she said, “That’s as it should be.”

Making that crust, rolling it out with a surprising sense of calm confidence, took me all of 20 minutes, including the cleanup.

I had made my first truly successful pie crust. The recipe made enough dough for two crusts, so a few days later I rolled out the second pie, which went even more smoothly and took only 10 minutes. Then I slid the pie into the oven with only a tiny spillover of the pumpkin filling. It baked into a beautifully imperfect pie.