Читать книгу Making Piece - Beth Howard M. - Страница 11

Number four on my to-do list—after Grief Counseling, Thyroid Treatment and Apartment Hunting, but before Figure out What to Do with Marcus’s Stuff—was Get a Job. Not a stressful job. Not my usual PR, or web producer, or journalism career-type job, but a peaceful, part-time, nurturing kind of job. I knew just what I needed to do. Bake pie.

Eight years earlier, in 2001, I had left a grueling, lucrative web-producing job to become a minimum-wage-making pie baker. I had traded in my Banana Republic suits and high-rise office in San Francisco for an apron, overalls and a small, steamy kitchen in Malibu. Over the course of my yearlong “pie-baking sabbatical” my bank account dwindled down to nothing (try living on minimum wage in Southern California), but the joy, the friendships and the fulfillment I gained were something money couldn’t buy.

I recognized that the amount of pie therapy required to recover from the blow of Marcus’s death would be significantly greater than what I needed after my dot com job. But I still had faith that the healing powers of baking—the Zen-like calm induced by rolling dough, the meditative trance achieved while peeling apples, the satisfaction of seeing a pale crust turn golden brown—could once again be effective.

I hoped to recreate the restorative days of Malibu, where we had been a team of women making our various handcrafted specialties. British baker, Jane Windsor, whose wicked sense of humor and fabulous accent rivaled the deliciousness of her scones and brownies, had been the leader of the gang. We gabbed as we peeled, chopped and stirred. We had formed a small community, our own kind of support group, based around the comfort of cooking—while making comfort food. During those days, when I wasn’t caught up in the plucky conversation, I got lost in my own world, transported by the process of creating edible works of art in my tiny corner of the kitchen, lulled into tranquility by the constant hum of the convection ovens.

That Malibu baking job was a salve on a fresh scar. I’d been working eighty hours a week at a cutting-edge dot com at the height of the boom, where the environment was competitive and cutthroat. In this new Internet world, the race was on to create The Next Big Thing. To go public. To have an IPO with shares valued at $200 each. To become the next millionaire under forty. I worked so much that I was eating carryout dinners in Styrofoam containers at my desk and sleeping with my cell phone next to my pillow. At least it proved I was capable of hard work.

I stayed with that San Francisco grind for over a year and a half, so it also proved I could hold a job longer than my previous record of eight months. This was saying a lot for me in normal cubicle hell conditions, but as a serial freelancer, sticking it out in this atmosphere, the extreme sports of workplaces … well, I was proud of myself. I was stretching and growing, but I was like a deer in the headlights with the daily challenges. I had to learn the language of computers, a vocabulary that increased with new terms faster than I could memorize them. And I was tasked with managing a team of young web designers who didn’t want to be managed, let alone show up for work before 1:00 p.m. Yet I was as caught up in the frenzy as the next person, wanting to succeed. Who doesn’t want to be a millionaire? I was also burning out faster than the cash from the company’s last round of funding.

The thing that tipped me over the edge was not a matter of politics or sleep deprivation. It was philosophical. The company’s oxymoronic mandate was to create more and more realistic virtual environments.

“Make the audience believe they can feel the salt water spray on their face,” my bosses insisted of the sailboat event I produced. “Make them think they are on the rock face, right there with the climber,” they said of the mountaineering expedition I worked on.

“It’s a computer monitor, guys, not a national park,” I wanted to remind them.

Then new orders came down from the chief executive officer. We were to get people to spend more time on their computers. Stickiness was the Word of the Day. But this was an outdoor-adventure website. And seeing as I was a journalist whose personal mission was to use my writing to motivate people to actually go outdoors and exercise as a way to empower themselves, my bosses and I had a fundamental difference of opinion. We were a mismatched couple with irreconcilable differences. So I told them to take my six-figure job and shove it.

“I’m going to go do something real, something tactile,” I told them during my exit interview. “I’m going to go work with my hands. I’m going to make pie.”

Why pie? Answering that is about as easy as explaining why seemingly healthy Marcus dropped dead at the age of forty-three. If only the answer was as easy as “It was his time.” An answer which is about as inane as a mountain climber explaining he climbs Everest “because it’s there.”

But pie? Pie was practically programmed into my DNA. Pie was the reason my parents got married. My mom can still describe how it happened in detail, how she and my dad were both living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. How my dad was studying to be a dentist and she had just graduated from nursing school. She lived with five other nurses in a one-bedroom apartment above my dad’s favorite bar. My mom had considered becoming a nun, but then she met my dad—a charming, funny, handsome guy, who played an impressive game of pool downstairs and who loved banana cream pie. Six months into their courtship, she saw her window of opportunity and invited my dad over for dinner. She kicked out her roommates for the evening and prepared a romantic feast of tuna casserole, red JELL-O “salad” and a made-from-scratch banana cream pie.

My mom put her heart and her hopes into that pie. If she wasn’t going to become a nun, she was going to get married—to my dad. First, she blind-baked the crust. She stirred the milk, sugar and eggs on the stovetop, cooking the vanilla custard. She sliced the ripe bananas and covered the whole lush thing with a generous portion of fresh whipped cream.

The candles burned down as the two prospective mates enjoyed their meal and, finally, after the last bite of pie had been swallowed, my dad leaned back in his chair and said to my mom, “Maureen, that was the best pie I ever had. Will you marry me?” No matter that he called her by the wrong name—her name is Marie, but his hearing was challenged even then—she said yes. The pie sealed the deal.

Pie went on to play a role in my childhood. After my parents got married, they left Wisconsin, spent two years in San Diego (where I was conceived) and eventually settled in my dad’s hometown of Ottumwa, Iowa. I was born third in line out of five kids. My mom was so busy shuttling us to our piano, cello, swim, tap, ballet, gymnastics, tennis, pottery and sewing lessons, there was no time left for baking. Therefore, my first pie of record—a slice of banana cream, forever my dad’s favorite—was consumed at an old-fashioned diner called Canteen Lunch in the Alley in Ottumwa.

It was on a Wednesday. I remember the day of the week, because as a dentist my dad had Wednesday afternoons off. Instead of escaping to the golf course like other medical professionals did, he picked up all five of us kids from elementary school in his little white Mustang and took us to the movie theater. We went to matinees and saw films inappropriate for our age, like Dirty Harry and Taxi Driver. We didn’t care. We got to be with our dad. And eat popcorn. And get away with something we knew our mom would not approve of. She would inevitably find out.

“To-om,” she would reprimand him when we got home, dragging out the syllables of his name. We always giggled when he got in trouble, thrilled to play a role in his game of defiance, a game I learned well and continue to play.

After the movie, he always took us to the Canteen Lunch in the Alley, a hole-in-the-wall, squatty, square-shaped, cinder-block building that, as the name implies, is situated in an alley. The Canteen, opened in the 1930s, was where my dad had developed his love for pie as a child and where nothing had changed since. Nothing. Not the speckled Formica countertop, the red vinyl-covered bar stools, the red-and white-checkered curtains or the pie safe, full of creamy and fruity homemade pies.

My dad lined up all five kids around the Canteen’s horseshoe-shaped counter, each of us sitting on our own swivel stool, and we proceeded to pig out on loose-meat burgers called “Canteens.” Our burgers were followed by pie. We each got our own slice. No sharing was required. My dad understood the importance of pie. He believed that no matter how stuffed our small bellies, there was always room for a whole slice of banana-cream goodness. He taught us to have reverence for this dessert, to start at the tip of the triangle with our forks and work our way back toward the crust. To let the meringue dissolve slowly on our tongues. And to moan with pleasure with each and every bite. We ate. We moaned. And we groaned from being so full.

Part of this pie initiation was also the lesson of saying thank you. We had to be reminded after the first few outings, but we eventually grasped the idea.

“Thank you, Dad,” we all chimed immediately after our burger and pie feasts.

Gratitude and pie. I never could have fathomed at age seven just what a critical role the combination of these two concepts would play in my future.

By the time I was old enough to learn any baking skills, we had entered the era when modern conveniences—like packaged pudding mix and premade pie dough—were the rage. Even my Midwestern grandmothers bought into these newfangled shortcuts, as they both had full-time jobs, and didn’t have time to make, let alone teach me, any of their old-fashioned recipes, pie or otherwise. At least my mom granted us kids full access to her kitchen, where we took turns making JELL-O 1-2-3 and no-bake cheesecake from a box. I also had my Suzy Homemaker oven, in which I baked minicakes by the heat of a lightbulb, but not pies.

Pie didn’t feature prominently in my life again until I was seventeen. I was on a bicycle trip, heading down the West Coast from Vancouver, British Columbia, toward San Francisco. I was traveling with a fellow camp counselor from Iowa after our summer session at Camp Abe Lincoln ended. Pedaling down Washington State’s dark and mossy Olympic Peninsula, we came upon a rare and welcome opening in the thick forest and feasted our eyes on an apple orchard. It was early September, so the trees were loaded with red, ripe fruit. The branches, so heavy-looking from the weight of all those juicy apples, seemed to be begging for relief. For two young and hungry cyclists, this was an open invitation to stop for a free snack. Besides, with all that bounty, who would miss a few? We got off our bikes, leaned our mighty steeds against the log fence and began to help ourselves. We had picked only three or four apples before an old man came storming out from the crumbling white farmhouse across the acreage.

“Hey! What are you doing on my property?” he shouted. His hair was white and uncombed, his face covered in gray stubble. His jeans were baggy and dirty, and he wore a grubby T-shirt yellowed from years of wear. He appeared unsteady on his legs, yet he charged at us with so much force we reeled back. For all our first impressions of him, he must have equally had his own ideas of us. He had every reason to be suspicious, dressed as we were in our black Lycra shorts, tight nylon shirts with rear pockets bulging with gear—and now apples—and funny little pointed shoes. Then again, given the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, he probably couldn’t see us very well.

“We’re riding our bikes down the coast,” we said. “We’re so sorry. We didn’t mean to trespass.”

He looked at us more closely, sizing up our tanned, athletic bodies and our cherubic faces. And then he softened. “Well, in that case …” The next thing we knew we were inside his home—making pie with our stolen apples. This grumpy old man, it turns out, was a retired pastry chef from the merchant marines.

The inside of his farmhouse was dusty, with stacks of old books and magazines piled up next to his threadbare sofa. The presence of kerosene lanterns and absence of lamps around the living room indicated that he didn’t have electricity. We moved into his kitchen, where a large, round table crowded the room. Collecting his ingredients from the deep, dark cupboards, he dived right into what would be my first pie lesson.

To make the dough, he used two dinner knives, moving them against each other in opposite directions, to cut the butter into the flour. He added just enough water to hold the flour together. Then, he used his craggy, weathered seaman’s hands to form two dough balls, and put the dough in his propane-powered refrigerator. While the dough was chilling, we helped peel and slice about ten small apples, saving the peelings for his compost and putting the slices into a bowl with the juice of a fresh lemon.

Dusk approached and he lit the kerosene lamps, so we had to finish baking by the dim lantern light. He rolled the chilled dough on his wooden slab of a kitchen table, first heavily flouring the surface, then flattening the dough into a circle with a heavy wooden rolling pin. We helped arrange the sliced apples in the pie dish. He added a cup of sugar, a few tablespoons of flour, a few shakes from his cinnamon jar, and placed a pat of butter on top. He covered the apple heap with the top crust. His hands crimped the crust’s edge, moving around the circle with the deft and speed of a seaman coiling ropes. Whatever marines he’d sailed with were lucky to have him on their ship; spending months at sea were certainly made much nicer accompanied by his homemade pies.

As our pie baked in his propane-fueled oven, gradually the musty smell of his house was replaced with a heavenly apple-cinnamon-butter scent. We fell asleep that night in our sleeping bags on his living-room floor, content and nourished by pie. From that moment on, banana cream, be damned. Apple pie was my thing.

I’m not saying it pays to steal, but thanks to the apple-thievery incident, I continued to make pies throughout my college years and beyond. Whenever I encountered apples, I made pie. Because I went to college in Washington State—where forty-two percent of America’s apples are grown—I made a lot of pies. Whenever I encountered a prospective husband, I applied my mother’s strategy and made pie. And because I was a warm-blooded young woman—a fallen Catholic, no less—I made even more pies. I made an apple pie for every eligible bachelor I set my sights on. For Scott, the sexy chemistry teacher who lived in a tree house near campus. For Chris, the Hollywood screenwriter. For Rick, the environmental lawyer. For Mike, the surfer/entrepreneur. For Adam, the bike racer. For Kenny, the trust-funder. For Yoshiyuki, the macadamia-nut farmer. For Scott, the blind-date billionaire. For Matthew, the hockey player. For Dion, the banker. Jesus, I made a lot of apple pie—or, as I liked to call it, “lust in a crust.”

“Delicious pie,” they would all say. “No one has ever made me a pie before.”

And yet, while two did propose (though, sadly, not the billionaire), none of these pies resulted in marriage—well, not until Marcus’s pie, but that didn’t come until much later. In spite of my pie prowess, my love life up to that point was like a greased pie plate—nothing stuck.

It wasn’t until I quit the dot com job in 2001—when I said, “Goodbye, cubicle” (and “Goodbye, big paycheck”)—that I shifted my pie intentions. Pie was no longer a wily attempt to impress guys. Pie became a way to restore balance. To soothe my tired, overworked soul. To get grounded after spending too much time in front of a computer and too little time interacting with people. Pie was a vehicle to transport me back to a time before computers and cell phones, when neighbors still stopped by unannounced for a back-door visit.

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.