Pies

Even though I’ve been baking pies for four decades, I’ve been known to serve a “boughten” pie, or bake a frozen one on occasion. It’s true that piecrust is more persnickety than cakes, and does not respond well to rough treatment or too much handling. If you can master the art of a good piecrust, you’ll be rewarded with a far superior product than anything you can buy at any stage of preparation.

For some unknown reason, it always seems that home cooks are better at one or the other; cakes or pies, but not both. My mother was a superb pie person, my aunt turned out wonderful cakes. We could always tell who made what at family dinners.

Commercially baked and frozen pies, along with frozen or refrigerated doughs and crusts all have one thing in common: they have to stand up to the rigors of shipping and handling. If they tried to make a flaky, delicate crust, it would be a big mess before it got many miles down the road.

If you want the pie experience; that is, the house full of the wonderful smell of baking, but without the effort of constructing a pie from scratch, then a frozen unbaked pie is a good choice. There are many great kinds on the market, and they taste just a tad better than the pre-baked kind. I personally prefer them over a pie made with packaged crust and canned filling.

There are a lot of other things you can make piecrust out of, besides the standard flour + shortening recipe. Graham crackers, are of course, an old standby, but you can also use vanilla wafers, shortbread or chocolate cookies. Another idea I go with sometimes is to use a cookie dough recipe, rolled out to fit the pan, and filled and baked as usual.

My father-in-law, Lowell Schuett, used to make pies with a cookie crust, but he didn’t even bother to crush them. He’d line the pan with whole cookies or crackers, and use broken ones to fill in the spaces. You wouldn’t win any ribbons at the county fair with this idea, but for the family it worked just fine.

Trudy W. Schuett has been online since 1995, and writes fiction and non-fiction in a variety of genres and subjects. She is also an entrant in Gather’s First Chapter Romance competition.