Apples, Pies, Now, Then

Our apple trees are overflowing with apples now that September is winding down. Or, no, how about: We have no apples on our apple trees as September winds down. The first is true of our apple trees in Point Roberts where, as we drove away this past week, I was still trying to figure out whom I could call to come over and use up plums and apples that would otherwise just fall on the ground and rot while we were gone. The second sentence, however (and sadly), is true of our apple trees in Roberts Creek, B.C. So that’s a problem because September is when one really needs apple pie quite frequently.

Our trees are bare because one of them is dead, slain by our local bear who several years ago tried to climb it while engaged in apple collection work, and broke it off sort of at the base. Ed applied emergency ICU care (mostly duct tape and a stick), and it did manage to survive another couple of years, but then this spring it bloomed and every part of it subsequently died. The other one (a Cox’s orange pippin) did bear this year but the fruits were not yet ripe when we left at the end of August. I’m willing to pick them a little short of fully ripe, but these were yet short of even mostly ripe. They were hard, green little apples. They might well have ripened during the three weeks we were away. And if so, the bear might well have eaten them all. He needs quite a bit of food and he does like apples. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence of bear in the yard, although most of the evidence suggests that what he’s eating is blackberries.

Once I found we had no apples, I walked up to our uphill neighbor who has several trees and she generously responded to my plea. This week, I have had apple pie and, if not enough to sustain me for a year, it has been very satisfying. Apple pie is good on its own terms, but it is also a family thing for me. Most of the cooking I ever learned, I taught myself. My mother taught me baking (cakes, cookies, bread), but pies I learned from my grandmother.

I think the things one learns from a grandparent are things that stay with you. Not only stay, but may not be adjusted, if my piecrust making is any indication. My grandfather never taught me to do anything, so I don’t know whether the same would be true of his educational work. In any case, whenever somebody tells me that pie crust is so much better if you make it with half butter, or with ice water, or if stored in the refrigerator for awhile, my inner grandmother says, ‘I don’t think so.’ Piecrust is to be made just as she told me to do it. That means you use shortening or lard, that you use one of those circular blade things with a wooden handle to cut the shortening into the flour, that you use cold water from the tap, that you don't handle it any more than you absolutely have to, and that you roll it out with a marble rolling pin. (I do use saran wrap to roll it out on, though. My grandmother would have included that if she had lived long enough to use saran wrap, is my belief.) There was a time when I didn’t have a marble rolling pin and it never worked as well with those wooden ones covered with knit sleeves. When my 18-year-old granddaughter, Gianna, was here this summer, piecrust making was one of the things she wanted to learn, so I passed on my grandmother’s methods. Of course they are also Gianna's grandmother's methods. I hope they’ll stick.

My grandmother was born in 1889, and her father fought in the Civil War, although I never knew him. Still it seems an enormous bunch of history between her awareness of the world before her birth and today, history that I, somehow, having known her well somehow have a purchase on or a place in. The piecrust is part of it. And the apple, something else that has a big part in our common history: see, e.g., Garden of Eden. Even more interesting, see Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan, a book that will help you to understand why apples are so quintessentially American and what Johnny Appleseed was really doing in his travels.

Good advice from me and my grandmother: the month is almost over, so remember to have some apple pie. It won't be the same in October.