pat willard

When I got married, I moved to a small town in Ohio called Ravenna where my husband, Chris, was a reporter for the county newspaper. Before I married I was writing a novel and working as a community organizer down in Atlanta, Georgia. But afterward, when all the boxes and hand-me-down furniture were packed into the small attic rooms of our first apartment, I had to find a job. After months of applying for the few jobs that fit my background, I settled in as the morning waitress at the BarTen Restaurant. It was considered one of the best positions in town, and I got the job only because the newspaper's photographer was a favorite customer and had vouched for my worthiness. I liked the work because it rescued us financially, but more because it gave me time in the afternoons to write. My shift started at seven, when the farmers came in for eggs, and coffee fortified with whiskey, and ended shortly after two, when the county judge from the courthouse across the street finished his turtle soup.

Unlike the afternoon and evening waitresses, I was expected to do some food preparation and to help cook breakfast when Senia or Anna, the cooks (both well into their seventies), were busy preparing the day's specials. In my family, being a good cook was considered a natural part of life, so in no time I was skillfully poaching eggs, flipping hash, and folding omelets. I liked being in the kitchen early in the morning and watching the hungry men and women smelling of dirt and hay plow through the breakfasts I made for them. While Senia and Anna told me stories about their lives, I fell into the quiet, peaceful rhythm of the work. Between the good talk and the simple food we served, by the time my shift ended, I felt, on most days, ready for the writing I was doing at home. But what I really longed to do, from the first day I began at the BarTen, was to learn to make pies the way Betty made them.

Betty was the midday waitress. She arrived at ten with her husband and unmarried son trailing behind her, all bearing trays of freshly baked pies. She had the best station in the restaurant -the one in front by the bar where all the lawyers and businesspeople liked to sit. She left promptly at two, when her husband came back to pick her up. Dressed in a neat white pantsuit, her white hair a flurry of curls, Betty smoked and gossiped through the workday. A good Christian woman with a husband who had his own trucking business, she didn't much need anyone's approval. She was not well liked by the staff because she had a rigid authority about her; cool and efficient, she gave the impression that she was a waitress above the pack. Betty grew to like me despite my college degree and sometimes strange opinions, but mostly, I think, because she knew I wasn't after her son the way she was convinced the evening waitress (a tramp, if Betty ever saw one living and breathing) was. When I finally got to know her well enough to ask her how to make a pie, she chalked up my ignorance to being a young city bride and wrote down the recipe for an all-purpose crust, including as a bonus the trick for a creamy custard filling.

It was as if I had just been given the secret to a long and happy life. The recipe was written surreptitiously on the back of a check (so that the others in the kitchen wouldn't see) and slipped to me at the end of my shift while I was putting on my coat. On my way home, I stopped at the grocery store and bought lard, eggs, and cornstarch. I forgot about everything else except what I was about to do. I kept thinking about the banana cream pie I was going to present to my husband that night, envisioning the swirling mass of meringue peaks on top and my husband's blissful face when he cut into it. At a time when we were still trying to find our footing together, the idea struck me as an essential equation that went something like this:

My husband loves pies + I learn to make pies = We will be forever one

So I hugged my bags of groceries and secret recipe and hurried home. For the rest of the afternoon I worked on that pie. At first, the dough stuck to the rolling pin, but eventually I rolled it out and got it somehow into the pie plate that I had received as a wedding present but had not taken out of the box until that day. The filling thickened, the bananas were ripe. Everything, it seemed, was coming out right.

Since the filling had to sit for a few hours, I planned to put the meringue on just before dinner and let it brown while we are. When Chris came home, he brought a few of his coworkers with him. We made a pitcher of martinis and sat out on our small roof deck. I sat there very pleased with myself and my secret, anxious for the other men to leave us alone. But another pitcher of drinks was mixed and somehow five of us sat down to eat the dinner I had prepared for Chris and me. Though I remembered to add the pie's meringue before I began serving, I forgot to take the pie out of the oven until I saw smoke pouring from the loose oven door. I ran to open it but it was too late; the meringue was a sooty mess.

This was the first important lesson I learned about pie-making-a blemished pie can almost always be salvaged. The bottom and custard were still okay, and the unsuspecting guests went on talking as I quickly spooned off some of the more burned bananas and meringue, whipped up more egg whites, and this time stood right in front of the oven window while the meringue browned lightly. I brought the pie to the table, gave the men strong cups of coffee, then cut into the pie with a knife dipped in hot water. After they took their first bite, I watched their faces melt with satisfied pleasure. When our guests finally left, the pie was nearly gone. Chris greedily scooped up the remains of the custard and broken pieces of crust from the bottom of the pie plate.

I made pie after pie after that, learning from Betty how to make a lattice top, a graham crust, gravy for savory pies. She taught me about the different types of flour and fat she used for flaky, short, and cobbler crusts. One day at the BarTen, Senia overheard Betty and I talking about pies and there ensued a heated discussion about vegetable shortening versus butter. Senia was for butter and pure lard; Betty swore by Crisco. I tried both and sided with Senia that butter gives crust more taste. My choice caused a breach in my friendship with Betty for a while. It seemed that although recipes for pie crusts are fairly standard and simple, there are as many opinions about quantity and method as there are bakers in the country. Even the wife of the restaurant owner, a very regal but sickly woman named Dotty roused herself when she heard about the goings-on from her husband to come down and give her opinion. She was a peacemaker in that her sweet crust was made with margarine, which produces a substantial, but less flaky, crust.

I gradually realized that every woman in town knew how to make a pie and most could do it with their eyes closed. As far as they were concerned, I was just doing what I was supposed to as a novice wife with a hungry husband to feed and a household to run. For me, though, making pies remained simply a pleasurable way of marking time. Yet even as I smiled at the quaintness of measuring a woman's worth by the quality of her crust, I began to see a certain strength in it. Betty made her daily allotment of twelve pies while babysitting her grandson, straightening up her house, and packing a hefty lunch for her husband. She gave hardly a thought to making pies. It was just something she did along with everything else. And yet it gave her a great deal of pride and pleasure to be known for her marvelous creations. No one who ate her pies thought of them simply as desserts. Rather, her pies were recognized as a symbol of a tradition passed on from one woman to the next. When I asked her how she managed to bake a dozen pies every morning, she shrugged and looked at me as if I were truly as foolish as she thought I was, with my education and funny opinions. "There's nothing to it," she said. "You just do it."

Later that year, after my husband was accepted into graduate school, we packed up and moved to New York City. I soon found a job helping to produce a newsletter that published restaurant reviews. I took cooking lessons from some of the best chefs in the city, ate in their restaurants, and attended their lectures. Yet what I learned from them was simply a variation on what I had gathered in the kitchen of the BarTen, especially from Betty. Making different kinds of pies had taught me about sauces, spices, flours, and fats. Pies could be fancy and elegant or humble and quick; they could feed two romantic souls or a pack of wolves. What I had learned about pies stuck with me for life.

The other day my youngest son sat at the kitchen counter struggling through his homework. My other son came in for lunch, followed by one of our dogs and my husband; a football got tossed around while math questions were shouted above the barking dog and brotherly taunts. Farther down the counter, I calmly pressed the rolling pin over the top of the wax paper and concentrated on the dough spreading below the sheet. It was this, I thought, that Betty taught me. Here I was, hundreds of miles away, far from a farm and in another life, with career and family crowding in on me, and I was doing nothing more special than finding a certain bit of harmony in the making of a pie.

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