The Man Who Ate Everything (63 page)

4. In a large bowl, toss the apple chunks with all the other filling ingredients and let stand for 10 to 15 minutes. The apples will give off some of their juice and shrink and soften a bit. If you leave the apples much longer, they can become wrinkled and rubbery as they lose too much juice.

5. Resume the main recipe at step 11.

Sour Cherry Filling

This filling makes the classic American cherry pie of song and story. Sour cherries are also known as pie cherries and are in season from about July 1 to mid-August throughout much of the country except the West. They are best in early season—firm, very tart, and bright red. Buy only those with their stems intact. Sour cherries ferment quickly after the stems are removed; this leaves an opening for bacteria and oxygen. Individually frozen sour cherries can make fine pies year-round, but most frozen cherries are shipped only to supermarkets in midwestern states, where cherry pie is king.

9 cups fresh sour cherries, stems and pits intact

4
^l
/2 tablespoons instant tapioca, whirled in a blender until itbecomes powder

2
^l
/4 cups sugar (decreased by
^l
/4 to
^l
/2 cup if, late in the season,
the cherries are particularly sweet for sour cherries)

1 tablespoon lemon juice, or more if the cherries are sweet

^l
/2 teaspoon salt

^l
/4 teaspoon (scant) “pure” or “natural” almond extract

1. At least
2
^l
/2
hours before you plan to bake the pie, make the cherry filling. Wash, stem, and pit the cherries (you should now have 6 cups), putting them into a non-reactive, 4-quart saucepan. (Williams-Sonoma and the Back to Basics catalog have inexpensive little plastic pitting machines that shorten the labor by at least half. They encourage you to make cherry pies.)

2.
Mix all the other ingredients with the cherries, and let the mixture stand for 30 minutes.

3. Bring the cherry mixture to a simmer over medium heat and cook for about 5 minutes, until it thickens.

4. Let the filling cool for
1
^l
/2
hours or longer, the last 30 minutes in the refrigerator. Warm fillings melt crusts.

5. No more than 20 minutes before the cherry mixture is cool, make the piecrust in the main recipe through step 10, page 485. If you are using Crisco and the weather is cool, there is no need to refrigerate the circles of dough. Pour the cherries and their juice into the bottom crust in step 11.

Peach Filling

4 pounds peaches (about 9 large or 16 medium)

1 lemon, cut in half

^l
/2 cup well-packed light brown sugar

^l
/2 cup granulated sugar

^l
/2 teaspoon salt

1 pinch nutmeg

1 pinch mace

^]
/4 teaspoon (scant) “pure” or “natural” almond extract

3 tablespoons cornstarch

1 tablespoon arrowroot

I.
Before making the piecrust, peel the peaches. If you dip each of them in boiling water for 15 seconds, the skins will slip off with the aid of a paring knife. Put them into a large bowl. Toss with the juice of one lemon half to prevent the peaches from browning.

Wild Blueberry Filling

Wild blueberries are smaller and more fragile than cultivated blueberries and have a much finer flavor and more interesting texture. A couple of summers ago in the Northeast, they were in season from August 1 to August 28. In a pinch you can use fresh cultivated blue-berries or even frozen blueberries. The recipe works fine with raspberries, blackberries, and most others, but strawberries require special treatment. Arrowroot is added to the cornstarch to make the juice shiny and transparent.

6 cups wild blueberries

2 cups sugar

5 tablespoons cornstarch

1/2
teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1. Make the piecrust in the main recipe through step 10, page 485.

2. While the piecrust is in the refrigerator, pick over the blueberries, removing any stems. Wash the fruit delicately and set to drain. Mix the other filling ingredients except for the lemon juice in a small bowl. Blueberry skins contain oxalic acid, which attacks nearly all starch thickeners. Peeling blueberries is an unheard-of task and would wreck their taste and shape. So we must expect irregular success in the thickening process.

3. Resume the main recipe with step 11. Just when the piecrust is ready for the fruit, sprinkle the blueberries with the lemon juice, toss them with the other filling ingredients, and pour them into the prepared piecrust.

Taking Our Measure

Q
How can you tell Americans apart from all
other people?

A. By their measuring cups. “Nowhere else but in these United States does an entire nation habitually and almost exclusively measure dry ingredients with a cup,” announced Raymond Sokolov, the
Wall Street Journal’s
“Leisure and Arts” page editor, who also wrote for years an indispensable column about food for
Natural History
magazine. There are a few exceptions: Canada, probably Australia, and possibly Iraq, where after decades of British administration some cookbooks specified the Players cigarette tin as a universal unit of measurement which the servants would not steal and could not break.

The rest of the world uses scales to weigh its dry ingredients because scales are vastly more accurate than cups for things like flour, cornstarch, and cocoa. Depending on how densely compacted it is, a pound of flour can fill up as few as three cups or as many as four and a half, which means that Americans almost never bake the same cake twice.

How ever did we get into such a pickle? Sokolov proposes the “Conestoga theory” of cup measurement—that “pioneers and homesteaders heading west did not bother lugging heavy metal scales with their weights.” But early American cookbooks call for flour by weight, at least some of the time, and it was not until Fannie Farmer’s
Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
of 1896, when most Conestoga wagons were rusting in suburban garages, that cup measurement was universally adopted—on the backward notion that it was more scientific. Marion Cunningham’s twelfth edition of Fannie Farmer (1979) gives both cups and grams.

November 1995