Summer Stories 2025: ‘Two Kinds of Dough’

I’d hoped to sleep a full eight hours but lately when the baby wakes for a moment, I’m up for the rest of the night. So here I am. Bleary, but with writing time. My shirt is on backwards. My eyes still won’t focus. But I can see to write. There is a shelter here, in this hour my son has given me.

I’m supposed to write something about pie. This has been true, one way or another, for about 15 years.

I don’t want to explain, one of my writing students recently said. Their story was so complicated, they said, they get tired just thinking about trying to explain. Not explaining, I told them, is a perfectly reasonable choice. I, too, would prefer to drop the reader into my life without preamble or justification and assume they will go along with me. There’s intimacy, starting in the middle. And trust. Which I know is asking a lot. When starting a story without warning doesn’t work, it’s like taking someone to dinner and making them pay. When it does work, why even think of money?

Now that I’m a parent I talk about money all the time. Dough. I used to just think about it all the time – how to make enough to have time to write and buy that dress and put gas in the car, plus all the basic needs I don’t want to explain, you know what they are. I used to make actual pie dough to make money-dough, which sort of worked for a while, but absolutely would not work today. Now that I’m a parent, money-thoughts overspill and run out of my mouth. How much child care costs. How much food costs. Flour, butter, fruit – they’ve all doubled. Talking about this kind of dough is tiresome, but it helps me feel like we’re still afloat, getting along even if we aren’t getting ahead.

What I’m trying to say, before I get too sidetracked by one kind of dough:

When I write about food – pie, in this case – I want to take for granted that my reader knows how seriously and how lightly to take this subject. It is everyday stuff. It is eternal stuff. It is stuff. A shard of crust that holds a world. A smear of dough my dishrag wipes away.

In 2014 I published a cookbook called “Pie School” about transforming butter, flour, and fruit into the kind of treat that transforms relationships, too. In 2023 I published a new edition with two new chapters, plus a handful of whole grain crusts inspired by local flours. I want to say I wrote those whole grain crust recipes and I did, but that doesn’t quite describe it. The recipes are based on my all-butter crust, which is based on the very first pie crust I ever successfully made, which was a combination of Cook’s Illustrated’s pie crust and – oh crap, I can’t remember. “Joy of Cooking”? What books was I using in 2007? I know I flipped through all my cookbooks, read the pie recipes, then hodge-podged a method that seemed, to me, to use what the methods all had in common while following the advice that struck me as most sensible. A smeary sort of research. What I got right and kept getting right was the ratio of fat to flour and a care with handling the dough.

I won a pie contest with that crust, which helped me meet Kate McDermott, who hadn’t yet written “Art of the Pie” but was well on her way. Kate introduced me to lard and reinforced the value of paying attention to your senses, going by feel and trusting yourself, especially while making pie. I’d been heading in that direction, but she gave me language. What I mean is she influenced me, and that it was hard to separate her influence from what I’d figured out on my own. By the time I started writing my book, they were all mixed together. Which felt funny, since my book came out first: my teacher’s wisdom in the bedrock of my voice.

I like to say that pie makes friends, not money. A different kind of dough.

During the pandemic about one-third of my income evaporated. I was in debt and had a baby coming – i.e. even less ability to earn. So I did what I’ve always done when I need money but don’t want to get a real job: I sold pie. I wasn’t showing yet, most people didn’t even know I was pregnant, so physically I could still handle baking 30 pies in a day and schlepping them to the farm where I was going to sell them. It was the first spring of the pandemic, rhubarb season, so all the pies were rhubarb. Everyone masked up.

Near the end of the sale, my friend came to pick up her frozen pie and, on the way to her car, got caught in a conversation. I watched her shift the pie from hand to hand while condensation beaded the plastic. You’re going to ruin that pie if you don’t freeze it or bake it immediately, I wanted to say, but it was her pie by then, and not my place to boss her about it.

Still, watching the pie melt was giving me physical discomfort. Thinking of all that labor – the rhubarb’s, the wheat’s, the farmer’s, mine – lost in a slush of melted pastry. Thinking of my reputation! The pie must be amazing or what kind of pie lady was I? Another customer wanted to talk to me about China and lab leaks but I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. I only had eyes for that pie. “Mmhmm,” I said. “Weird,” I said. “I didn’t know that,” I said.

Finally, my friend broke away from her conversation and put the pie in a cooler. I followed her movements until the pie was safe. That’s when I noticed the handgun on my chatty customer’s hip. The guy was masked, armed, a little too friendly. If this were a heist movie he’d have made off with my dough, all my money and the rest of my pies, which would have melted down to goo before he could get them to his secret hideout, the dollars and sugar and butter and rhubarb all smeared into each other like some nightmare economic chart – but nothing like that happened. The guy talked my ear off, I paid attention because he was armed, then he left without buying anything. He probably even thought he was harmless.

With pie sales, I made enough to pay off my debt and make some donations. A clear slate. A drop in the bucket. Pie makes dough, I like to say, but only if you don’t do the math. I did the math. I made about $13 an hour.