COOKBOOK SHELF
pIE EVERY DAY R E C I P E S A N D
S L I C E S O F L I F E
By Pat Willard Algonquin, 288 pages BY MARIALISA CALTA time spent in the kitchen is intimate time: You don't want to spend it with just anyone. That's why cookbook writers who combine memoir with their recipes have to be careful -- because they've got to win us over with their prose and personality, not just with their food. When this combination works, as it did in the late Laurie Colwin's "Home Cooking," you feel the presence of a culinary kindred spirit. But when it fails, you want the offending author out of your kitchen immediately. You may have a hard time liking Pat Willard in the first sections of her new book, "Pie Every Day." Her family life seems too picture-perfect. She describes, on one typical afternoon, a son who's doing his homework at the kitchen table, her dog barking, her husband and another son tossing around a football -- in the kitchen? -- while she serenely rolls out a pie crust. Her sister is an annoying earth mother who "produces babies one after another" and used "what was left of her enormous energy" to turn a parking lot into a mini-farm. Willard fails to find amusing a snooty chef's explanation that a tarte Tatin flopped because "the pastry chef was ovulating" ("Deeply offended by his sexist remark," she intones, "I never went back to his restaurant"). But I really lost it when she wrote that she loved working the early morning shift as a waitress and short-order cook because it "gave me time in the afternoons to write." Having been a waitress and a short-order cook myself, I can tell you that the work doesn't leave you ready to write. It leaves you exhausted, your brain as scrambled as a Western omelet. Soon enough, though, I hit a chapter in which Willard recalls her second son's infancy, and how she became "heavy with guilt" and "weepy with despair" when she was trapped at home with a baby who wouldn't sleep. "I could not pretend that I wasn't miserable," she writes. "How much I loved Al, and how much I wanted to be rid of him!" This honesty is direct and appealing, even in a book about pies. I began to notice allusions to epic hangovers (she offers a pecan pie recipe as a cure) and parties that turned into drunken brawls. There's even a line from her glamorous mother-in-law who counseled that serving your guests take-out or catered meals was "perfectly acceptable, especially when most of [them] are tanked." And happily, Willard is a pie purist who admits that she "is not averse to using store-bought crusts" on occasion. The more I read, the less Willard seemed like June Cleaver and the more like someone I might like to hang out with -- someone I might even like to invite over for, well, a slice of pie. And if I did, you can bet I'd want these recipes to work with. Willard's book is not as comprehensive as the volume I consider the pie bible, Susan Purdy's "As Easy As Pie." But it runs a close second. Willard's chapter on crusts is worth the price of admission. She demystifies the process, she's open-minded about the butter vs. lard vs. Crisco controversy, and she rightly points out that different crusts are designed for different fillings. I'm a sucker for savory pies, and her tartlet fillings (red pepper and caviar, Roquefort, herbed goat cheese, tapenade) sent me running to the kitchen, as did her sweet potato filling and the smoked eggplant filling for phyllo hors d'oeuvres. She makes a good case for returning to the days when pie -- sturdy, no-nonsense, filling pie -- was everyday fare, not just fancy dessert. I disliked Willard's chapter on children's pies (her recipe for "Popcorn Ice Cream Pie" is just pandering to the little tyrants), and I will put my rhubarb pie up against hers any day (the secret to mine is orange zest and a dose of Grand Marnier). But these are small matters. Willard gives meat pies, cream pies, custard fruit pies, nut pies and meringue pies their due, with enough unusual variations -- Plum Tart with Lemon Curd, Cappuccino Pie, Tiramisu Pie -- to satisfy culinary adventurers. She wisely saves apple pie for her finale. There's a compelling, not cloying, sweetness about this last chapter, in which Willard describes bouts of insomnia and lets us in on some of her wee-hours reveries, from memories of a recovering alcoholic uncle to musings about the Pilgrims, who unwrapped the branches of apple trees uprooted in their homeland and planted the "green shoots in unfamiliar soil in the hope of making for themselves a better life." What ultimately emerges from "Pie Every Day" is a real person, with complex troubles and joys and -- luckily for her and us -- a great pie in the oven.
Marialisa Calta bakes pies, and writes about food, from her home in Calais, Vt. Pat Willard's recipe for Tapenade Tartlets P R E V I O U S R E V I E W S "The Book of Jewish Food" and "In Memory's Kitchen" reviewed by Robert Sietsema (03/12/97)
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