On the manifold virtues of pies

Ingredients for apple-pie filling
8 apples, sliced into bite-sized to half inch pieces (recommended for baking: northern spies but any tart/hard apples will do)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup (grade B)
cinnamon and nutmeg to taste
3 tablespoons corn starch or arrowroot powder
dash of vanilla extract

Since returning to Michigan after a spring semester in Maine, I’ve taken steps to become a pie boulangère, all in the interest of keeping the spirit of transcendentalism close against my mind and discerning, once again, its perceptible weight on my open hands. Thus, in every kitchen I step in, pies have begun to spring out of thin air. All sorts of pies. Apple pies. Cherry pies. Blueberry pies. My fall skirts are ornamented with patterned streaks of flour, now becoming a permanent fixture of my daily apparel, of my daily countenance.

Some of my friends think I have gone wide-eyed pie-crazy.

This may or may not be the case, but I would just like to add here that they are perhaps the primary beneficiaries of my pie-inspired neuroses. The number-of-pies-coming-out-of-the-oven to the-number-of-pies-that-I-can-feasibly-eat is a fairly high ratio and consequently, I have begun leaving pies, carefully wrapped in aluminum foil and with the tell-tale etchings of a lattice top, at my friends’ doorsteps. I’ve also noticed a change in my parents’ attitude towards me. I dare say that the atmosphere is merrier when we drive back to their house with a pie pan in my lap than without. (Perhaps a general rule of thumb in all scenarios.)
While most people around me have written me off as merely caught up in a fiery passion, clad in the flour emblazoned trappings of a pie enthusiast, clearly fueled by insomnia, stress hormones and oscillating Michigan temperature, I’d like to say that I have more reason than that.

Andrew Jackson Downing says, spurred by a quote of Emerson’s:

“Fine fruit is the flower of commodities.” It is the most perfect union of the useful and the beautiful that the earth knows. Trees full of soft foliage; blossoms fresh with spring bounty; and, finally, fruit, rich, bloom-dusted, melting, and luscious.

This is one of the reasons I love to bake pies. When I pull out the pie pans and roll up my sleeves, I think about the seasonality of the earth, that serendipitous 23 degree tilt, and how we are inextricably tied to it. Fruits are tied to nature’s cycle, not the supermarkets’ and it is picked from farms, borrowed from your neighborhood’s hidden gardens, scavenged from the town’s public trees before they are crushed under pedestrian heels (my pie maestro and inspiration, Emily, calls it “guerilla urban berry picking”) these fruit are intimately bound to both coordinates of time and place. Fruits are one of the more edible, evident manifestations of the invisible, yet honest geometric reality of the earth. What’s more amazing is that not only does it call upon geologic traditions but human traditions as well: art and altruism (since they are constructed often with these in mind) and a history of refined practices (to make the perfect crust) passed through the fabric of time, pie by pie, until it reaches us, here, now, and when you think about it, we eat all of it — all of it collectively: time, place, history — and make it a part of us… literally! In baking a pie, you invite others to share in all of these wonderful abstractions with you as you sit around a table, on a blanket laid on a spread of grass, stand around a tiny college living room, and then you make it tangible. It becomes your body. It becomes your actions.

Or maybe it’s more aptly described as a rampant yearning for authenticity, to feel the texture of something real again. In acknowledging the most fundamental phenomena of the earth, listening to its rhythms that connect it to something much larger, we can begin to rediscover the value in our hands and what we can mold from the raw, most altruistic organism – the Earth. No matter how removed we now are, how civilized we are, no matter whatever socially constructed mannerisms we have acquired, no matter how deeply we’ve spiritually convinced ourselves that money is the pearl we orbit around, we are born from the earth, blossomed from its pieces. It amazes me to think that one day, far in the future, these things won’t be here anymore. This ground, all these books, my fingers that type… and what have we got to show? I’d like to spend my days rapt in life-affirming, actions. Because, once, life lived here. Not your car or your designer dress. Not resumes suggesting your estimated social worth. But pure, unadulterated, life.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.