Big Meal Prep

Thinking my way to Turkey Day

Dear Readers,

I'm still mystified by the election and trying to figure out how to use my feelings to positive effect. One of the hardest parts is thinking about the schisms dividing our country. We are divided, like oil and water in a measuring cup — but we aren’t ingredients. We are people, and we are growing less and less able to see each other as parts of a whole. How can we emulsify? Maybe I’ll find some ideas Thursday when I’m making gravy.

I hope you enjoyed last week's Q & A with Ellen Gray and are adding her pie lessons to your Thanksgiving plans. I'm handing over the pies to my husband, who wants to make them with his mom. At first, I was disappointed and argued with him, craving the making myself. But my mother-in-law talked him into his first entrepreneurial effort, making and selling pumpkin pies when he was a kid, so they need this activity more.

Ellie Markovitch made me fall in love with handpies.

Instead, I’ll recall making hand pies with Ellie. One year when I was working at the food pantry and community meals program, we made 100 hand pies. The meal ended with slices of regular pie, and the hand pies went home. I love to picture the string of hands making the crust, rolling it out, pressing the edges closed with a fork. Volunteers handing the pies to guests, who put the ziploc bags in their pockets. I can see particular pairs of hands, holding their snacks.

This is a chain of care. The exchange, the giving, of myself to another, is what I most love about food. We can give words or hugs, and plenty of things, but there’s something so wonderful about feeding people. I also know I have to be careful in overvaluing this giving. How much does it serve me to be generous?

This is on my mind because I looked at some community cookbooks from the late 1800s at the Hart Cluett Museum. Though I have a lot of old cook booklets, most of them are advertising, and I’m new to this neighborhood of food writing. I found a digital bevy of them at the Library of Congress, Michigan State University, and the Boston Public Library, which traces their advent to the Civil War.

These cookbooks were made by women, and usually for fundraising for church or other causes. Sometimes, they were produced by national companies that specialized in community cookbooks, and allowed groups to personalize sections, especially ads. The ads give clues to everyday living, showing where people bought food, furniture and china. The most interesting one I saw is Personally Conducted Tours Through Our Kitchens.

This was made and printed locally, in 1897, by The Friends of the Sisterhood of St. Paul’s Church. The friends even advertised their own goods, stating that ‘Any one wishing to help the poor can do so by buying useful and fancy articles.’ I don’t know who made the ‘ready made aprons and underclothing,’ whether it was members of the church sewing, or purchased from women who did piecework.

The recipes come from people in town, and from a couple of cookbooks, Table Talk, a then new Philadelphia cookbook, and Mrs. Rorer, whose books and teaching were famous. Here’s one of a few recipes for oyster pie.

Oyster Pie

Make a rich paste with two cupfuls of flour, half a cupful of butter, one teaspoonful of salt and quarter of cupful ice water. Cut the butter into the flour, to which has been added the salt, and moisten with the water; take only enough to moisten and add carefully, cutting and folding. Turn out upon the board, roll and fold as directed for paste four times. Put in the ice box to get very cool before using. When ready to make the pie;, roll out half of the paste and line a deep pie; dish. Drain fifty oysters from their liquor, turn into the pie; dish with one quarter of a cupful of bread crumbs, one tablespoonful of butter cut in pieces, and quarter of cupful of oyster liquor, salt and pepper to taste. Roll; out the; remaining; half; of the; paste for the; upper crust. in a quick oven for thirty minutes. Bake in a quick oven for 30 minutes.

At the bottom of recipe pages, there are more ads, and quotes, like these:

• Webster or Standard Dictionary, with stand, $12. The Northern News Company.

• If lawyers knew how to hold their tongues the devil would have no material for his Christmas pie.

• To give to a needy stomach only that which has no attractions for your own, is the kind of charity, which even your dog might not thank you for.

I enjoy reading the grocers’ sales pitches, and thought you would like this one —

Wouldn’t you like to inspect Mr. Cox’s Superior Stock, and appreciate his Bread, Cakes & Pies? I’ve never heard of Diabetic or health flours as categories, so I’ve got more digging to do.

And now, praise for book that came out this week: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World.

My family loves this fruit, so I was primed to love this book, but you’ll like it too, even if you haven’t had Juneberries, Saskatoon berries, Shad berries — these are some of the many names this bush/tree has earned. As the Indigenous botanist writes, when a plant has lots of names it shows the popularity and usefulness of a plant.

These are street trees around us, and they make the best pie. Kimmerer chooses the Serviceberry as a model of interdependence. Without the participation of birds, and fungi in the soil, these plants couldn’t continue. “All flourishing is mutual,” writes Kimmerer, and humans should model our lives on the natural world. What if economics mimicked the mutuality of ecosystems? Instead, market economies are extractive.

Thinking about these ideas, I insert the charity concept and find its biggest flaw. Charity is something we do to or for another — give them diapers, give them bags of food for their Thanksgiving dinners. It’s a stream that creates and reinforces us and them, rather than mutual aid efforts, which come from within a community, ideally, and make for a less hierarchical flow of goods and services.

I think there’s a parallel between the loving wisdom of this book, and reforms we could make to the charity food system. How can we act more like plants, in need of and in service to each other?

Please put this book on your wish list or gift list, and read it!

Yours, Amy

Notes:

1. I will make a pumpkin cheesecake using baked squash, because most pumpkin pies are really made from squash. But I can’t say ‘squash cheesecake’ can I? That sounds dismal.

2. Listen to an interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer here. Read, or listen to her read an essay related to this new book here.

3. I worked for six years in the emergency feeding system — this is the name given to charitable food distribution in North America. The emergency began when Reagan and his administration began dismantling the social safety net, and it never stopped. This accordion of need expanded during the pandemic, and that is not going to stop, so I shouldn’t critique the levers that feed folks. But donating ‘spoiled’ food became a tax write-off, and I wish that better systems existed to address food insecurity.

4. I read Personally Conducted Tours Through Our Kitchens, at the Rensselaer County Historical Society, and the images in this piece are from Hathitrust, which hosts a digitized copy you can access here.