The Pie They Would Not Let Me Enter

So that is how I came to give a pie crust lesson on a paper plate, on a card table, on the concrete outside the exhibit hall, to the young woman who had just taken my ribbon, in front of God and half the county.

“Tell me how you made it,” I said.

She told me. She had left the lard out on the counter so it would be soft and easy to work. She had mixed it good and smooth so there would not be any lumps. She had rolled it and laid it in the foil pan and filled it and put it in a three-fifty oven on the middle rack for an hour.

“Who taught you?”

“Nobody.” She shifted the baby. “My mamaw made this pie. Blackberry, off her back fence, over in Lyon County. She made it every Fourth of July of my life. She died in April.” Her voice held, but only just. “She never wrote one thing down. Not one. I have been trying since May to make it come out like hers and it will not. I thought if I entered it, somebody here would tell me what was the matter with it. That is the only reason I brought it. I did not come to win anything.”

I had to look down at the paper plate for a second.

Eleven years before, I had stood in that same building with my dead mother’s pie in my shaking hands. The only difference between that girl and me was that my mother had made me stand at her elbow.

“What was your mamaw’s name?”

“June. June Kirby.”

“Well, Kayla. Mrs. Kirby did three things she never told you, because she did not know she was doing them. Nobody does. Put your hand out.”

I put a spoon of lard in her palm, straight from the tin. She flinched.

“It is cold.”

“That is the first thing. It ought to be so cold it hurts your fingers. You left yours out to get soft. Soft lard melts into the flour and you get paste. Cold lard stays in little pieces.” I shook flour onto a paper plate and cut the lard into it with two plastic forks, rough, and tipped the plate so she could see. “Look there. See those lumps, the size of a field pea? You worked all yours out. You want them. Every one of those is a flake. In the oven it melts and leaves a little pocket where it was, and that is what makes a crust shatter.”

“I thought lumps meant I had done it wrong.”

“Everybody does. That is the second thing. Quit while it still looks wrong. A crust that looks smooth in the bowl is already ruined.”

Donna had fetched a paper cup of ice water from the lemonade stand without being asked. I dribbled in a little and pushed it together with my fingertips, and it came into a rough ball, ugly as homemade sin.

“Now the third thing, and this is the one that got you. Your oven.”

“Three-fifty.”

“Too cool, and too high up. The bottom of a berry pie is sitting under a quart of juice. If the heat does not get to that bottom crust fast, before the juice does, it will never bake. It only soaks.” I held my hand out flat and low. “Four twenty-five. Bottom rack, the very lowest. Twenty minutes. Then you turn it down to three-fifty and let it finish. Hot and low first, then easy.”