Pie are Round

In the summer of 1990 my former husband and I moved from southern California to a little town  outside Corvallis, Oregon called Philomath (which means ‘lover of learning, especially a student of mathematics’). We bought our first house there, a sweet little 1940’s bungalow that had a concord grape arbor that spanned about 16 feet across the back of the house. It grew so prolifically that if I didn’t prune it back assertively every week it would have overtaken the house.

Come late September/early October the aroma of ripe concord grapes was almost overpowering, and if I didn’t get them picked fast enough birds would get drunk on them and try to fly through the big picture window under the arbor. In addition to making grape jam and grape juice, this gave me an opportunity to make a family favorite - concord grape pie. You can find a good recipe for this in The Joy of Cooking. 

And of course, there are all the other wonderful fruits and berries in the Pacific Northwest. So despite the fact that I had just begun my first term of graduate school, which involved commuting two hours a day, and despite the fact that I had recently adopted a highly energetic and high maintenance yellow lab puppy, I decided that I should devote myself to mastering the art of pie baking. Every Sunday afternoon I baked a pie of one variety or another, and then invited a couple or so friends over to dinner. When we sold that house five years later I had a clause inserted in the contract that said I had the rights to come back each fall to pick a grocery sack full of grapes. 

When I moved from there to Santa Fe in the fall of 1999, one of the things that I knew I would miss, besides my friends, was the fruit and all the pie baking. But then I discovered that there is a place called Pie Town in New Mexico! It was established about a hundred years ago and got its name because there was a dried-apple pie business. There isn’t much to the town and the population hovers a bit under 200, but there are three pie cafes (at least one now closed) that make it somewhat of a destination, as well as a Pie Festival in September. 

In 2014 my friend Jane Rosemont made a short documentary film called Pie Lady of Pie Town, about Kathy Knapp, the owner and proprietor of the Pie-O-Neer cafe. When Jane held a crowdfunding campaign to make the film, I threw in a donation, and when she hosted a fund-raising pie baking class with Kathy I signed right up.

There were about a dozen of us crowded around Jane’s kitchen island for the class and we went around the room introducing ourselves. When it was my turn and I mentioned that my specialty was woven pie crust Kathy said “Well then, you can teach that to the class.” And so I did. We made a dozen different kinds of pie that day, and of course got to eat them all too. 

Last fall my partner, Nelson, and I took a little road trip through rural New Mexico, stopping at Tinkertown, the Very Large Array, (look them up), and of course, Pie Town. After a somewhat harrowing drive down a back road to Pie Town, we arrived at the Pie-O-Neer shortly before closing. “What possessed you to do that?”, asked Kathy. “I always tell people not to take that road.” But it was well worth it. Since we were the last customers of the day, Kathy sat down and had a nice chat with us, as well as giving us some free pie for the road in addition to what we had already gotten to eat there. Sadly, the Pie Lady has now closed her doors, so we are very glad we had that time with her last year.

Nelson, in my humble opinion, spends far too much time reading the news on his IPhone, which is attached to him all day long. I gave him a challenge this year - in each calendar month, if he can spend one entire day completely away from technology and away from the news, he gets to have me bake him a pie of his choice. It’s not easy for him, but it appears that the reward is worth it to him. This month he got to have a coconut cream pie, which I think might have been one of my best. He claims that next month he is going to have me make his pie in a square pan so that I can say that pie are square.

While I haven’t kept up the same rate of pie baking as I did when I lived in Oregon, it’s still my dessert of choice to make when I have friends over for dinner. I’ve had my friends Dawn and Daniel over a number of times, so they have experienced various pies that I’ve made. Daniel happens to be the photographer for the local magazine in our community, Eldorado Living. He suggested to the editor that she include an article about my pies, and that, of course, he would be the photographer for the article.

Here you have a copy of the article, along with the recipe, if you’d like to try it. Yes, the pie is sitting on top of a runner that I wove. No pie loom required for the crust - enjoy!