One of the quiet joys of being a restaurant pastry chef is that you arrive early, typically before anyone else, probably just an hour or two after the last of the line cooks are done scrubbing and sanitizing the splashbacks and lowboys. The room invariably still smells like degreaser and leftover wine, no matter how immaculate. That is, at least until you pop your first espresso shot, then a third and a fourth. Here you make yourself a kind of force field. You get to take time to enjoy the kind of inspiration that being alone in a giant kitchen full of your tools and favorite recipes might bring.
On those mornings, I would use my early arrival as a chance to thumb through my cookbooks. Some of these books were by renowned pastry chefs, but a majority were castoffs from rummage sales and “free” bins at the library. They were full of recipes that people once exchanged verbally before eventually typing them up and binding them with plastic spirals. In these volumes, I found inspiration and personal stories — and often scrap papers with handwritten recipes tucked among the pages.
Then I would get to work on my own recipes. I would roll out a dozen or two pie shells to pop in a freezer and begin my near-daily dance with buttermilk chess pies, where I would be at the center of a carefully choreographed performance of whisking, filling, baking, rotating, cooling.
While it was a very simple recipe, I had, without knowing it, created quite an art of the thing. Timing was essential: never missing a step, never letting my timer outsmart my sense of smell, never letting a young baker crack the door too soon to check thewiggle. I aimed for nothing less than a particular type of perfection with that pie. I knew it, and it knew me. It wasn’t quite right unless the crackle appeared on top, the edges were flaky and tender and the bottom was both crisp and soft.
A righteous piece of pie is easy to find on menus these days, but that wasn’t always the case.
I started putting slices of pie (and layer cake) on menus as early as 2008, when my obsession with those yard-sale recipe boxes and community cookbooks began. Here, with a few strangers’ handwritten recipes or newspaper clippings, is where my tinkering started.
It feels silly to say, as it is so common these days to find a righteous piece of pie on the menu of an upscale restaurant, but it wasn’t so much the case back then. Pie and other humble desserts that fall into the category of Americana have had to earn their place in the echelon of “fine desserts,” but there were, in the early 2000s, a host of loudmouth bakers, most of us Southern, who insisted that there was something more there, something elegant.
Partly it was familiarity we played on, but for me and for pastry chefs like Kelly Fields and Dolester Miles, the beauty was in acknowledging that a slice of pie or layer cake was just as technically masterful, as culturally rich and as full of potential as a Sacher torte or a French almond gâteau. I believe, to this day, that one of the best things to happen to dessert, in the time of glossy and thin slices of flourless chocolate cake and panna cottas reigning supreme in every “nice” restaurant in America, was Miles’s placing a regal and drop-dead-delicious slice of a three-layer coconut-pecan cake on a vintage plate, handpicked by the restaurateur Pardis Stitt, at Chez Fonfon in Birmingham, Ala. There, the chef Frank Stitt has for decades created, by my estimation, some of the most beautiful food in the country, and Dol, as those lucky enough to know her call her, helped to redefine how to serve dessert in a fine-dining establishment.
I was proud to follow in her footsteps, doing similar work in Nashville, nodding her way, each of us helping to actualize a dessert zeitgeist quietly in our own ways, her with her cake and me with my slices of buttermilk chess pie, topped with gently macerated peaches sometimes or, in the winter, graced with nothing at all but a little crème frâiche. These are desserts, long after each of our departures, that remain on the menus we’ve left behind.
I’m not mad that my recipe for buttermilk chess pie has followed me around for over a decade, making it even to this column. Rather, I’m proud that I was a part of an era of bakers and pastry chefs that took the humble desserts of our region and childhoods and gave them as big of a stage, and honored them with fine technique and ingredients, as we could. I hope I’ll still be talking about this pie for many years to come. And I hope when people make it, they know that I found its inspiration in an old book, thrown in a box, written on a scrap piece of paper from long ago, lovingly jotted down for someone else to know about.
#Pie #Ill #Shut
