Beth Howard - Making Piece

“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.

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.