Attention all minutemen! I’m sounding the alarm! Does your heart beat red, white and blue? Then it’s time to act! The most insidious grocery-based revolution since the Whisky Rebellion is afoot.
If you mess with this, you mess with America
Who is this culinary Benedict Arnold and what is his purpose? Why, it’s none other than Slate‘s Nathan Heller, who just last week wrote a polemic against that tasty, scrumptious and, yes, American food: Pie. Already, brave patriots who know more about the subject than I do have risen to the defense of our national pastry. But even as I sit in a foreign land surrounded by foreign food and foreign customs, I cannot help but, with a tear in my eye and a song in my heart, to rise to the defense of my mother country’s dessert.
No, friends, no. Put away the tar and the feathers. Heller attempts to make his case in taste and reason, and it is with taste and reason that we shall defeat him.
As I read it, Heller’s case stands on four points: pie is un-American, pie is messy, pie is difficult to make and pie is not that tasty. Yes, yes, I understand your reaction, but calm down. We’ll address each argument in turn.
First, Heller argues that pie is un-American. Evidently, we gullible Americans, misinformed by the insidious pie lobby, should be shocked that pie migrated here from Europe like the rest of us instead of somehow springing from the ground, fertilized by Benjamin Franklin himself and brought from sea to shining sea by Johnny Appleseed. Wow, I’m flabbergasted! Clearly we must refuse to call anything American that migrated here a couple centuries ago to evolve into a new identity. If pie’s un-American sin is that it has foreign ancestors, then this is a stain the majority of us bear. Like it or not, we are a land of immigrants. There’s a reason why our national beef patty is named after a city in northern Germany, and those hot dogs we consume at baseball games were once called Frankfurters. Unless you are a pure-blood Native American, you have foreign relatives who touched down around the same time pie did, perhaps much sooner. My paternal grandmother was an Estonian who came to America via Germany. I find it very American that our own President had a Kenyan father. Heck, the Statue of Liberty herself was a gift from the French. The fact that the puritans didn’t have fruit pie at the first Thanksgiving is irrelevant. If heller demands such national purity for his American food menu, then he is carrying a short list.
Heller spends a lot of words complaining that pie is messy. Oh dear, someone give this delicate person a napkin for his wittle mouth and wipe his wittle nose. By all means, don’t give him salsa for his chips or sauce for his ribs, lest he gets stains on his frock. Burritos are messy. A hot dog, properly decked in condiments, is messy. Lasagna is messy. What do they have in common? They’re delicious! Again, if Heller prefers food that doesn’t risk staining his fingers or spreading across his plate like the ocean tide, then there’s a lot more he’s missing out on than pie.
Heller also whines that pie is a lot of effort. Such blood, sweat and tears to make a messy foreign substance! Ok, my sarcasm tank is almost empty, so I’ll let the more mature Pie It Forward blog I linked to earlier speak to this point:
“The best pie, the pie that, in my book counts as pie, was made in a home, with love, with the best, freshest, regionally and seasonally-appropriate ingredients. The best pie takes a lot of time and not a little effort. It is made by those who have made hundreds of pies, some good, some bad. It goes from ingredients to oven to plate in the shortest possible amount of time. In the best pie, you can taste the sun that ripened the fruit, the spices and flavorings pop and the crust reminds you of the grandmother you wish you’d had; the one that knew how to make a really excellent pie.”
If he wants to, Heller can find all he wants to complain about in pie in the frozen food section of his local grocery store. With a little effort, excellent pie is possible.
This leads us to Heller’s argument that pie just doesn’t taste good. Well, ultimately, taste is in the tongue of the eater, and if he just plain doesn’t like pie, then that leaves more for the rest of us. And again, if we’re talking about mass-produced pie from the grocery store or some sort of short-cut halfway pie made with canned goods, then I’m with him. But the presence of McDonald’s doesn’t mean hamburgers are bad. The presence of Coors doesn’t mean beer is bad. The same goes with pie.
Here’s Heller’s closing point:
“Your own grandmother, grandfather, or other kitchen-able elder no doubt makes the best, most unequivocally delicious pie that I will ever taste. These people should be proud. The lengths we’ve gone to in order to make a pre-medieval baking technique as toothsome as possible today are proof of American ingenuity and care. But is this a cause worth the effort?”
I wonder if Heller needs to expand his circle to include such a pie-making elder, or younger, as it is in my case. You see, I am the beneficiary of my pie-loving sisters. When the family gets together, say Christmas or a summer holiday, the three of them, along with my mother, take the time, the efforts and the fresh ingredients to make some spectacular pies, among them apple, peach and (my favorite) chocolate pecan. None are too sweet, nor do they carry a fake sort of syrupy. I’d take a piece of any of them before even the most creative cupcake. And here’s the thing: they keep doing it. For them, part of the joy of baking, and baking well, is the baking part. There’s pleasure in working hard with loved ones to create something delicious for loved ones.
Worth the effort? An emphatic, freedom-ringing, home run-hitting, flag-waiving, red coat-fighting, eagle-screaming, anthem-singing, firework-cracking, Thanksgiving-celebrating, 50 State-memorizing yes.
(Photo by norwichnuts)
