The Crying Pie

A reminder from Thanksgivings past

Fifty-plus years ago, when life looked like this, Mom and Dad went to a dinner party, and for dessert, the hostess served this absolutely amazing pie; a dark chocolate ganache over a silky custard filling, and a light cream top. Dad absolutely loved it, and Mom asked for the recipe.

“Oh, no,” the hostess said. “You don’t want this recipe. This is the hardest pie I’ve ever made.” She said to share the recipe would be a hate crime against hostesses, but Mom was young, and filled with energy and hope and optimism, and Mom was Mom, so it became the family tradition: Black Bottom Pie, every holiday.

Or, as Steve has come to call it, the Crying Pie, because, well, because of what happened when I tried to make it, on my own, the last Thanksgiving of Mom’s life, ten years ago.

Abundance and Joy

Once Marc and I were older, Mom usually worked at the hospital long past the dinner hour, eating cheese toast at 9 pm. But Thanksgiving was always like a swan dive back into my childhood, table filled with an overflowing abundance of family, and chaos, and Thanksgiving dishes. Every single year included:

• Two platters of turkey (set up high because one year my dog Boo ran off with an entire thigh, his first and only time snatching food and he went all in, props to Boo);

• Sweet potato casserole with both brown sugar pecan and marshmallow topping because that was Mom’s way of loving, who has to choose;

• Green bean/cheese casserole, made by me in such gerrymandered proportions that Dad would periodically hold up a single bean as he ate and shout I found one!;

• Homemade braided saffron bread, sometimes dense as biscuits, sometimes high as clouds, Mom never paid much attention to the age of her yeast;

• Creamed corn with just a little bit of bacon even though Aunt Linda had been frying it all day, because everyone who walked through the kitchen grabbed a piece;

• “Swiss Soup”, a dish made of canned fruits and jello, which gave me real Southern church street cred when I brought it to an early Warren Wilson potluck;

• Stuffing, two huge pans of it, that only Dad ever ate because so much competition;

• Squash casserole because Dad begged for “please one thing on the table with no cheese or marshmallows,”

It was a glorious spread, so bounteous that one year, as we began to serve ourselves from the buffet, I moved my eyes up and down the row and shrieked like a horror movie.

We had forgotten to make macaroni and cheese, which I say only because can you imagine how full I already felt, that I didn’t need the macaroni. It didn’t matter that Mom only cooked once a year; the love I got from all those meals nourishes me even now.

But the highlight of it all, the signature dish, the dish that inspired a Children’s Sermon one year from Steve, was the pie. The pie had become Mom’s signature achievement, the hallmark of every family occasion, the first question asked by everyone who had been to a holiday before: “Is your Mom doing the pie?”

That g*d*mn pie.

Do Not Try This At Home

If a cooking blog tried to publish the recipe for Black Bottom Pie today, the comments section would cause the author to delete their account. For instance, it requires a chocolate ganache and custard be prepared at the exact same time, both elements being stirred constantly over low heat while adding different ingredients at different time, one takes about seven minutes to make, the other about twenty five, but they have to finish at the exact same time, at which point you combine one-third of the hot custard mix into the chocolate mixture.

Physically impossible, to do alone, so for the last twenty years, I had become Mom’s sous chef, her pastry assistant. Every Thanksgiving we huddled for hours over burners and twelve different measuring implements, coming back in at various intervals of chilling and setting and blending until we could finally put the second-to-last layer in place, and go to bed on Wednesday night confident that the hardest part of Thanksgiving was done. The pie was always the hard part, and Thanksgiving would be all the fun.

But in 2013, nothing would be fun at all. There was not a huge family gathering, because Mom was in the final stages of her illness. She could barely stand, her mental state was as fragile as wet tissue paper, and it was just the four of us in Asheville, me and Steve and Dad and Mom, trying to pretend we were grateful. On Wednesday morning, Dad and Steve and I puttered around in the kitchen making conversation, and then I went into the bedroom to see if Mom was able to get up. She was lying flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and she scowled at me when I cheerfully said good morning.

“I was just lying here listening to you,” she said. “And it was like I was already gone. You’d already moved on without me.”

It was all terrible, but I was still going to make pie.

All You Need…

It was my first year taking the lead role on pie making. Steve was Steve was playing the part previously played by me, stirring when told, and periodically doing math when I shrieked, what is double five and three-eighths, because I had forgotten to check it in advance and if I didn’t act in the next ten seconds the cream would curdle. Mom was sitting at the kitchen bar, and I was trying to make it all seem fun, I was trying to make everything seem fun, everything is fine, but it wasn’t fine and all three of us in the kitchen knew it.

I’d made it through the custard-ganache stage intact; at least I thought I had. The final stage before you could rest on Wednesday night was to combine the second two-thirds of the custard mix, which had set for a precise amount of time, with a sort of meringue-style layer, with two-thirds of the egg whites from six hours ago, use a hand blender tilted at 37 degrees, I’m only kind of kidding. This was the last step, the part where you pull back the curtain and hope a rabbit is standing there. If the custard has set, and the meringue has risen, you blend them together into a soft, creamy, silky, light pudding.

I whipped up my meringue okay, but when I pulled my custard out it… sloshed. It sloshed. Custards are not supposed to slosh. I swear, I had stirred until it coated the back of a wooden spoon, the way Mom taught me, but it looked like a bowl of chicken broth. I tried to blend the meringue in, but the meringue somehow vanished, and all I had left was...water.

I stared with horror into the bowl. “Oh no.”

After all this work, I had nothing but vaguely custard-colored water. Steve, a first time sous chef, did not understand what the pie was supposed to look like, he did not know this was an unmitigated disaster, but Mom knew.

She was unsteady on her feet, as she crossed the kitchen to peer into the bowl. She had to hold the edge of the oven to stand up. Her eyes flickered as she looked up at me.

I was crying, and she always wanted to make it better, when my heart was broken. She always wanted to fix it. But she was too weak, and she couldn’t make the pie herself anymore.

“You never know,” Mom said. “Pour it into the pie tins and let it set.”

I knew the pie was beyond saving. “It is ruined,” I wept.

Everything was ruined. Everything was ruined, and I couldn’t even make a pie.

Mom insisted, “Let’s see what it looks like in the morning,” and I jammed the two bowls into the fridge, but went to bed angry and filled with despair.

All You Need… and Time

But it’s all fine, because of what happened on the last Thanksgiving of Mom’s life. I was despondent, I had given up, I thought the only reason Mom thought the pie would be okay was because of her dementia, but when I rolled open the kitchen door, well, you know how Jesus turned water into wine? Somehow, overnight, my water turned into pie.

And pie is always better than wine, if you ask me: Two perfectly creamy custards atop two perfectly proportioned chocolate ganache over one glorious Graham Cracker Crust. I was agog, I was aghast, but we had a perfect Black Bottom day.

The last pie Mom and I ever made together was a triumph, one of the last triumphs Mom had left. And it gave me a new story. It’s a story that I have been telling all year long, in different ways. It’s the story Steve used once in a Children’s Sermon, when he told the story of the “Crying Pie”.

“Sometimes you think everything is ruined,” he said to them. “But if you keep going, if you just give it time, everything will be okay.”

Ten years later, I can still make Black Bottom Pie, when called upon, most recently for my nephew, who wanted his girlfriend to experience the famous Castellani family pie. And here’s the thing, here’s the secret, here’s my trick, are you ready?

I always ruin it.

Honestly. Wrecking the Black Bottom Pie has become a ritual, a rite of passage. At some point during the process, I think oh, this is destroyed, but then I keep going, and now I have even come to expect it.

The year after Mom died, I snuck out to the movies and returned to a brick of custard-colored cement that laughed in the face of meringue. One year I forgot to set a timer for the graham cracker crust, and attempted to pass it off as Blackened Bottom Pie. Once I didn’t put enough custard in the ganache and Black Bottom Pie was No Bottom Pie.

But it’s always fine.

It’s the last story Mom taught me, and maybe the most important story I tell in my life today. When I stood there, destroyed, crying, at the very end of the best part of my life, when I thought everything was ruined…I was wrong.

The pie got better overnight. Other things took a little bit longer, but they got better too.

Nothing was ruined. The pie always comes out in the end. Crooked, blackened, scant of bottom, it’s still fine. It’s still pie and like life itself, pie is always a blessing.

I’ve said it before, I’ve written it before, this is the Thanksgiving version:

The abyss is inevitable.

If you make pie, you will cry.

At some point, you will think everything is ruined. But just keep going.

You’d be astonished what can change, with just a bit of time.

And Mom was wrong about one other thing.

We haven’t gone on without her, not one bit. She is still right here, right beside me, alive within me, every single day.

I wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving, whether it is the first year of something new, or the last year of something precious, because the truth is, every Thanksgiving is always both of those things, all at the same time.