Issue 1: Pie

We came up with this newsletter as a way for us to write about those things that happen around our food — but the food itself is pretty good, too.

Pie, Making, by Maya: I never feel more unmoored than when I’m freelancing. Days of the week only exist inasmuch as I need to know when it’s Wednesday so I can hop on a call with my editor. You can eat breakfast at home at any time of the day, or only get out of bed at noon because that’s when you booked a Flywheel class in Williamsburg. (It is possible that I am not freelancing correctly.) After four years of working at a Job, of showing up in the morning and leaving at 6, the level of freedom I have when I am the boss of me is intoxicating, confusing, and terrifying. 

Sometimes, though, it is good, like when Kate asked me if I wanted to come over and bake a pecan pie on a Monday afternoon.

I haven’t been able to use my oven in months. We are no closer to figuring out why our landlord turned off our gas in June, or why it has taken four months to turn it back on. It almost came back on Monday, when a man from National Grid showed up to turn it on, but my incompetent landlord didn’t leave us the key for the boiler room, so the National Grid man couldn’t do the last step of his inspection before turning on our gas, and I couldn’t call the landlord because it was Sukkot, and our super, the only person who knows how to get into the lockbox that contains the elusive other key, didn’t respond to my frantic calls, and that is how I ended up helplessly sobbing to the man from National Grid, who is surely not paid enough for that.

Baking and cooking are substantially cheaper than therapy, less chemically fucky than SSRIs, and produce a tangible result you can hold up and share with people in your life and show off and eat. Cooking is one of my favorite things to do. If I cannot bake a loaf of bread in my home soon I may finally have my long-anticipated mental breakdown. [ED. NOTE: the gas in Maya’s apartment was FINALLY restored on Thursday, one day before we published this newsletter. Really makes you think!!!] I have been buoyed by friends: our friend Tom let me bake a cake in his oven; Emma puts together dinner parties for our pals; and Kate let me come over and bake a pie with her when it became apparent that we could not complete the task in my cold apartment. 

In her kitchen, Kate assigned me quiet tasks — chopping pecans, crimping the crust, measuring molasses — which felt so soothing. It’s hard to explain the satisfaction I get from taking individually unremarkable ingredients and turning them into something beautiful, or at least cohesive and edible. It’s like putting together all of the research and interviews you did for a story and then seeing the final thing with your name on it. It’s a sense of accomplishment and ownership when you don’t feel like you have much else to feel proud of or to call your own. 

I left for dinner before the pie was out of the oven, but I’m glad Kate got to make her (first!) pie, and in the process help me retain my sanity and let me be a pie doula for a day.

Pie, Eaten, by Emma: I did not get to participate in the making of this pie, because my office is open on Columbus Day, but I did go over to Kate’s house after work to partake of it. Just getting myself to Kate’s apartment on the subway felt like an achievement, because I was having what I like to call an Extreme Sad, and when I am having an Extreme Sad I generally take a car home alone, get in bed, and eat—doesn’t matter what, really—until I feel sick. Then I go to sleep, puffy and tear-stained, and wake up feeling even worse. 

“Why is she talking about her eating disorder on this nice cooking newsletter I signed up for?”, you ask yourself, and it’s a fair question. My answer isn’t particularly erudite, except to say that for myself—and many people—it’s very hard to extricate a food conversation from a feelings conversation, because the former is used to suffuse the other until it’s almost impossible to pry them apart. 

Anyway! Pie! Kate served me an enchanting bowl of homemade beef stew, which she said wasn’t “brothy” enough but I disagree, and we had orange wine before digging into the pie. I normally only have pecan pie at Thanksgiving, which gave the whole scene a celebratory air, even though I was, as previously mentioned, Big Sad. (Extreme downgraded to Big by presence of pie). 

Kate’s cat Paula kindly held hands with me for a while as I admired the pie, which had a sort of “deconstructed” vibe to it, and basically tasted like a carefully created pile of sugared pecans held together by gooey crust. This is exactly how I want pie to be—I do not care about its structural integrity at all—and as I ate it, I caught myself feeling something happiness-adjacent. Did I log the slice of pie in my WeightWatchers app on the way home, along with everything else I’d eaten that day? Sure, because birth is a curse and existence is a prison, but folks? The pie fucked, and nothing can change that.  

Pie, Mothered, by Kate: Before Monday, I had never found reason to bake a pie. There’s an embarrassingly long list of foods that I decided as a kid I didn’t like without ever trying them, and I’ve avoided them to this day. Pie falls somewhere between “tofu” and “any vegetable” because, as I will soon get printed on t-shirts, fruit is not dessert. Sugar, molasses, and pecans, however, are, so a simple pecan pie seemed like a good compromise to pop my pie cherry (and if you think it necessary to point out that a cherry pie would clearly work better with that metaphor, I invite you to reread the end of my previous sentence). 

Despite paying for a New York Times Cooking subscription, I’ve found myself more often than not turning to Bon Appetit when I want a recipe for a basic dish done right (their Halftime Chili recipe is a recent favorite). You can’t go wrong with a URL that simply reads best-pecan-pie, so this is the one I went for. 

Here are some things I fucked up: The pie crust was too thin, so not only did it break apart immediately upon serving, it also had cracks that allowed the pie filling to seep through and burn against the edge of the glass pie dish while in the oven. For that reason, you kind of had to scoop the pie out in globs into a bowl, which would have been the case regardless, because I did not let the pie set the requisite three house before serving it. 

Despite its flimsy structure, the pie had a longevity beyond what I expected. Its life began Monday afternoon, when Maya, bereft of her own ability to make pie due to NYC landlord incompetence, chopped pecans and I pulsed flour, sugar, and butter for the crust in a food processor. It was born later that evening unto Emma, who needed somewhere to go that wasn’t home with her thoughts. We sat on the floor of my living room because I still haven’t bought a table for my apartment and spooned the gloop into our mouths with a side of ice cream as Spotify cycled through the “Women Of Folk” playlist it (correctly) suggested to us. Two days later, my boyfriend and I each ate another slice (a loose interpretation of the word) while standing upright in my kitchen. I was grumpy after commuting in the rain and spending too much of my day on the phone with my insurance, but got through it knowing there was a treat to come home to. A couple more servings remain, sitting in the plastic-wrapped dish on my kitchen island. My sister has a friend visiting this weekend, and I’m sure the two of them will help finish the leftovers. What a nice life for a pie to have that’s just a few short days making many people happy in the different ways they needed it. 

It’s these little moments that have always been what cooking is to me, when you sneak a sip of the wine before pouring it into your stew, or get up early on a group trip to make everyone coffee and breakfast in the Airbnb kitchen, or bike to a party with a tub of homemade ice cream in a cooler in the front basket. We came up with this newsletter as a way for us to write about those things that happen around our food — but the food itself is pretty good, too.

Crumbs:

• Maya wrote a piece for the NYT about anchovies, which is how the idea for this project began. 

• Someone finally invited Kate to a Rosh Hashanah dinner earlier this month, which was a meal of firsts.

• Emma brought lunch to work every day this week, please clap.