"Everyone has a pie who loves it"

Evan Kleiman

It’s (not) a simple question: cake or pie? Cakes are there to highlight events or people, to delight. The magnitude and volume of an event is often reflected in the ingredients and time used in making a cake (with the generous exception of coffee cakes). Cakes that celebrate are ostentatious by design and punchy with flavour. Cakes  say, “look at me!”

If cakes are show ponies, then pies are workhorses. Cakes invite you to focus on your own joy in eating them, but pies are made for enjoying each other’s company. They are joy as a collective rather than singular experience. This is not to say that pies cannot be an indulgence or a celebration, but they don’t need to flash to be important. Someone’s coming to visit? Pie. Have to feed a large group? Pie. Pies do not wish to be glorified, they are quiet distinction made manifest. 

Pies remind you of the passage of time through repetition. We make this pie here and now, and we will make that pie later. The act of repetition in a kitchen leads to prodigiousness, it permits you to assess and proceed in situ. With pies, it’s about knowing which percentage of fats will yield which results, or how much flour or pressure can be added when rolling dough. A seasoned pie maker knows when a pie is ready, not because of an oven thermometer or a timer, but because of the smell that issues at a particular moment in baking, when sugars, fats, and flour are browning at their optimal point. 

Pies are sustenance of the highest and humblest character. The dovetailing of those two characteristics is what makes them so meaningful. When it comes to the highlights of our gastronomic lives, we think it will be found in notable feasts, or distinct dishes at certain tables that will mark our lives.  But what about the last time you will bake a pie for, or with, someone. No one can tell you what it will be like when you have just finished the last slice of the last pie that someone made for you. The smallest of sweetnesses are suddenly the most important. 

The daily bread becomes a last supper. We do not expect these moments to hold, we do not think we need them to. Moments that seem mundane when unfolding, eventually and retroactively shift gears. In the same way, we cannot hold on to the moment when we learn of someone’s death. In the cracking of an instant part of our world has ended, yet we observe the world continuing to move forward, and at a speed we did not expect. Our person has stopped, stopped breathing, stopped being, so we expect the world to stop. 

There is a real tension in this shift in perception: we are very present in this very real moment, and yet there is a forward momentum we cannot stop. We do not wish to repeat it. The first repetitions after a death are often the strangest.  They remind us (again) that time does continue. The first holiday. The first missed birthday, yours and theirs. Here, we find a new tension as the repetition asks to continue of its own momentum, without the person in question. It’s a habit forged in the before times, with acts ready to be repeated, but we may not always be. 

When my sister Ginette was a child, her birthday fell smack dab in the middle of August, wild blueberry season in this part of the country. By the time she was old enough to be asked what she would like for her birthday, a request for a blueberry pie, not cake, was made. My mother can’t really recall why, or even if it was anything was made of this shift. It’s just what Ginette wanted. Wild blueberries would be picked nearby. Hands, faces, mouths, and clothes would be smeared sweet indigo. Fruit was encased in a pastry crust, and served still warm from the oven if you please. After her passing, it was unanimous amongst my parents and I that we would continue to make pie for Ginette. We thought it would be in the form of her wild blueberry pie, but we soon saw that the habit would take another shape, feeding us in a different way.

When she was still around, Ginette would often bake with her young daughters. Cookies and muffins were preferred, things that could be dumped and stirred in bowls, no matter the size of the hand yielding the spoon. Pies, however, were not part of my sister’s baking routine. Why would she, she said, as my mother and myself were the “ones who had the patience for it.” At our (unbeknownst to us) last Christmas with Gi, my eldest niece Sophie stood on a chair and watched as I mixed flour and fat together. Ella, the younger sister, tasted and mixed the apples and honey, letting us know it would indeed be a good apple pie at dessert. 

Over the years, I have baked many a pie with my nieces. It was, and is, the thing we do when we get together. Ella knows which apples work best together: Gravensteins with Jonagold for varying textures. Honey as needed, cinnamon and nutmeg to taste. Sophie is now comfortable enough to make pie on her own, unsupervised. She uses her hands when mixing the dough, rather than knives, a pastry cutter, or even a mixer. Her proficiency in pie crusts has even convinced her grandmother to abandon her personal practice of using a pastry cutter to mix the flour and fat together. 

When teaching someone to bake, it’s important to show them why you’re doing something in a particular manner, why certain steps are followed in a certain order. It’s about seeing the logic in things, rather than blindly do them. A baker’s habits start to make sense. “A cup is not always a cup,” I tell the girls. “Watch this.” I pack one measuring cup tightly with flour, dipping and scooping as I go. With the second cup, I get them to fluff the flour first, to use a table spoon to add it in, one spoonful at a time. Sophie is intent on getting it right, and Ella is wondering why she needs to be so precise. My mother grabs the digital scale for us and places it on the counter. “It should read one hundred and twenty grams for one cup of flour,” I tell the girls. We weigh each cup. Dip-and-scoop is 145 grams. The spoon-by-spoon cup is 123 grams. Sophie is satisfied, with Ella quietly saying, “Whoa.” 

I don’t expect a twelve-year-old and a ten-year-old to know or care about military precision in measuring when baking, but I do want to arm them with as many tools as I can. Wait until you try to add more flour, the dough will come together. That’s why you measured, so that if you do need more flour when rolling, it won’t impact the dough. Sophie, I know you say you don’t like cinnamon on it’s own, but taste this cinnamon from Sri Lanka. Are the apples sweet enough? Yes Ella, you can lick the bowl. Beyond measuring, mixing, and rolling, I tell them, “you will screw it up at some point, and you’ll probably be the only one who knows, or cares.” It’s about giving yourself permission to go, to try, to see. To go from process to paraphrase, without losing anything important.

Simon Thibault is an author, food writer and editor whose work have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The National Post, CBC and Radio-Canada and many more. Find him at simonthibault.com

Adam Myatt is a comedian, artist and writer who lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia. @trulymadlyadam

This piece is in edible Maritimes, Summer 2023