I rendered the suet Tuesday because Marlene says a Pi Day crust that rests less than 72 hours is basically a cracker, and Cleo has been asking about Pi Day since Garrett mentioned it at breakfast in a tone of voice that I think was supposed to be educational but mostly just made her want pie.
So we’re doing pie. Apple. From the apples we wrapped in newspaper in October and put in the cellar on a wooden rack that my father-in-law built specifically so apples wouldn’t touch anything modern. Three of them have a soft spot and Marlene says those are the ones with the most information in them, which I cannot verify but also cannot disprove, so they’re going in.
The crust formula came from a Facebook group called Pastry Before 1910, which is exactly what it sounds like and which I now check more often than the weather. The recipe is: ancestral flour, rendered beef tallow from a cow we can name, Redmond Real Salt (which is a mineral, not an ingredient — I will die on this hill), and spring water that has been sitting uncovered on the counter overnight so the chlorine can leave. That’s it. That’s the whole pie crust. Four things, and one of them is technically a rock.
I know what you’re going to say, which is that the time counts as an ingredient. Marlene and I have talked about this at length and the consensus in the group is that time is a process, not a thing, and processes are free. Sourdough people figured this out twenty years ago and the rest of us are just catching up. If you can’t measure it in cups, it doesn’t go on the label.
For the filling we’re using the apples, raw honey from Garrett’s coworker Dale who keeps bees in a way Marlene calls “correct,” and cinnamon, which is bark, which is from a tree, which means it’s basically a vegetable. I checked this with my sister-in-law Rachel who works the front desk at a pediatric clinic and is basically a nurse, and she said “sure, I guess,” which in our family is a yes.
Cleo is in charge of measuring, but only with the glass measuring cup, not the plastic one, because the plastic one lived in the dishwasher for six years before I knew better and at this point it is essentially a delivery system. We don’t talk about the plastic one. It’s in a drawer.
Garrett asked me, while I was straining the tallow through a piece of cheesecloth I boiled in vinegar, whether it was weird that we celebrated a math holiday by spending three days on a single dessert, and I told him that Pi isn’t actually a number, it’s a ratio, and a ratio is just the universe’s way of telling us that some things don’t resolve neatly, and a pie that takes 72 hours and contains a mineral is, if anything, more spiritually accurate to the holiday than a pie from a tube at Kroger. He went back to the garage.
The Pastry Before 1910 ladies are doing a thread today where everyone posts their crust and the comments are mostly about lard sourcing and one woman in Vermont who claims her great-grandmother’s recipe calls for a tablespoon of cold cellar dirt, which the group is divided on but which I personally find compelling. I’m not adding dirt this year. I’m not ready. But I’m thinking about it for Easter.
Cleo just asked if Pi Day pie has to be circle-shaped and I told her yes, because of math, and she said “what about a square one” and honestly I don’t have an answer for that and I’m not going to pretend I do. That’s the kind of question Pi Day is for. A holiday that makes a six-year-old question geometry is doing more for this country than most of them.
The pie goes in at three-fourteen. Obviously. We’re not animals.