Read Online A Commonplace Book of Pie by Kate Lebo - Free Book Online Page B

she made pastry instead of slow-rising brown bread, wrapped the apples so they would not get cold, and baked them in her wood-burning oven. When William Cottonwood returned from the fields, he smelled his dinner on the windowsill and said, “Wife, give me a kiss. Food without hospitality is medicine.” It was a proverb he had heard in the tavern in town, where apple cider ran cleaner than water from any well in this would-be virgin world his people had claimed by calling it new.
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Plum
    In plum country, landlords own houses but not the trees that twist their yards into piles of light breakfast. Their leases include flecked black canning pots as wide and deep as stoves; the last page grants harvest rights to Renter if she recruits her own crows to pick the fallen clean. She has grown out of her father’s house but not his dinner dictums, so Take all you want but eat all you take turns April’s greed of blossoms into August’s tyranny of plums. Her fingers are blued by Italian prunes she rushes into jam and suspends in honey before the fruit can wrinkle into rot. She’ll sweeten bread with her labor all winter, and vote for a mayor who believes plum pie is a currency that should be traded, never sold, especially between the treed and treeless.
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Cranberry
    You dare not trust yourself to make the house pleasant with your wit and so you buy ice cream. Hello cranberry pie-lover. Your lights are light because your darks are dark, bog-like, ballooned. Where your rivers break into lakes, weeds silk the dark water. Do you wonder how it feels to back-float in a cranberry field, cerise fruit bubbling up your arms’ lazy windmill? What would cranberries sound like, their million submerged collisions? Like a tub of loose beads? A handful of lost change chattering in the dirt? The bite of tart fruit loses its teeth
a la mode
—but why speak of it? You’re too adult to chew open mouthed, yet this pie is more vivid under the light of a loose jaw, a little air.
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Strawberry Rhubarb
    A marriage of convenience that lucked into love. I’d like to meet you on your wedding day, poured into a delicate dress and shaking with the weight of the unknown. I want to see the strange face of your groom lit with conjugal dread, the purse of his lips as he leans in to learn how to kiss, the yield and stop of your painted mouth, so careful. You each held mouthfuls of pearls. I want to watch the moment your dread met his. How the first clutch of feeling transformed into fear and you began to understand that fear is a scout for your soul’s journey toward what it truly wants. You faced the crowd for the first time together, hand in hand, and walked into the sum of your new life, a new name to bind you.
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Rhubarb Custard
    The woman who serves rhubarb custard pie is queen of the tealit dining room, her whisperclean countertops formica bright. Though she has been known to fake orgasms, she would never serve Splenda to guests. Her smile can stretch criticism into compliments and put a man in the wrong for being born without dimples. She knows rhubarb is a vegetable but lets it pretend otherwise. Doesn’t mind when the Washington State Rhubarb Coalition cross-dresses it in custard and plates it quivering pale, lukewarm to the fork. Of the forgivenesses available for use by the average human, hers is the kind that would rather be wrong than rude.
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Shaker Lemon
    Often overlooked in favor of lemon meringue, Shaker lemon pie is not a housewife’s treat so much as a grandmother’s indulgence. The recipe is as easy to remember as a cliché: slice two lemons paper thin, macerate in two cups sugar overnight, beat four eggs and gently stir into lemon-sugar, add filling to crust, bake, bam. The sort of recipe that finds a flat surface in the brain and settles for life. Those who prefer Shaker lemon pie above all other pies get immense satisfaction from organizing