It’s All About the Pie

by Sally Jack
“Whoever eats the most turkey and potatoes can have the most pie,” my grandfather said every Thanksgiving. As a boy, my pie-loving father trustingly believed him and tucked into the turkey and taters with zeal, his eye on the pie.
Strangely enough, he never had much room left for pie, and Grandpa, with a chuckle, enjoyed plenty of pie before Daddy finally caught on to his trick –which he passed down to us. We were never taken in by it, though, because we knew the story.
Instead, our family love of pie morphed into Pie Night, a tradition where we get together either the day before or the day after Thanksgiving solely to eat pie, tasting slivers of every flavor that we didn’t (or won’t) have room for after the big turkey dinner with trimmings.
We make so many pies that there’s usually as many pies as people. It’s great fun! In fact, Pie Night is looked forward to with such joy that it often eclipses Thanksgiving altogether.
Our newly married son experienced something of a shock the first time he had Thanksgiving with his in-laws; he breathlessly called us on the phone to relate that there was only one pie to be shared between 15 people! He rushed to the store and bought three more, so that there would be enough for “a proper Thanksgiving.”
But who can resist with so many delicious flavors to choose from: lemon meringue, chocolate cream, banana cream, coconut cream, cherry, apple, blueberry, pecan, and of course pumpkin.
My all-time favorite kind of pie is the one my sister-in-law made as newlywed. Her mother-in-law gave her a boxful of home canned peaches, pears, juice, applesauce, and cherries.
She was delighted, and went to work making a cherry pie for her husband. It was a beautiful pie. “The best crust I ever made,” she recalls. She proudly set the pie on the table before him. He cut a slice and took the first bite.
Crunch! Then crunch crunch.
The surprise on his face was priceless. It turns out that his bride had just invented a new classic – the world’s first and only Concord Grape Pie – with seeds.
“My mom always made grape juice concentrate. How was I supposed to know that you could can grape juice with the grapes right in the bottle?” she laughs.
She had diligently poured all of the good grape juice down the sink and saved the withered grapes for the pie, opening two bottles of grape juice to have enough “cherries” to fill the pie shell.
Once we went to visit my sister for a holiday weekend. My contribution to dinner that night was a chocolate cream pie for dessert. After our car was loaded to the gills with sleeping bags and suitcases, there wasn’t any place to put the pie.
“I’ll just hold it,” I said. “No, you’re not going to hold a pie on your lap all the way to Payson,” Derryl said.
He gently took the pie from me and placed it on the hump on the floor between the driver side and the passenger side. (This was an old time car without the big console that divides the two front seats nowadays.)
I said it would never make it there without falling off. He said it would. I said it wouldn’t. “I’ll drive carefully,” he said, “It’ll be fine.”
I tried not to say any more about it, which nearly did me in, because talking too much happens to be a specialty of mine, but I did my best not to refer to the precarious position of the pie riding in high style between us.
I have to hand it to him, Derryl truly is a good driver, and he did drive very carefully. The pie was fine until we took the exit to Payson.
At this precise moment, the pie chose to slide off the hump, where it dumped the contents on the floor at my feet.
Even happily married couples don’t always see eye to eye; this was definitely one of those cross-eyed moments for us. The car was a mess, the pie was ruined, and we were both mad.
Neither one of us said a word, but boy ol’ howdy, were the sparks flying! By the time we pulled up to my sister’s house and she took in the pie-on-the-floor mess and the expressions on our faces, she was in serious danger of being electrocuted.
“I know how to fix that,” she said. She went into the house and returned with three forks and plates.
“There’s only one thing to do,” she said, “eat dessert first. The pie will taste the same whether it is upside-over or right side up, so dig in.”
Since little sisters (and their husbands) always do what big sisters tell them to do, we dug in, taking turns to use our forks to scoop bites of pie off the floor onto our plates.
We ate pie until we started finding bits of floor fuzz mixed in with the pie. By that time, we were all laughing.
My sister was right. Sometimes we need to just slow down, chill out, and eat dessert first. If you’re lucky enough to share it with those who love and understand you best, it makes life all the sweeter.