Rhubarb Pie

Pie has a civilizing effect on people.  Mash a hot slice into the toothless mouth of a howling wino and they'll instantly relax and pledge to bathe immediately.  Force-feed a morsel to a crooked banker and they'll never securitize another stated income loan again.  The guys at the shooting range will switch their bullets from lead to copper, fools will read, readers will exercise, and dogs will grow thumbs.  Pie is the brain tonic of baked goods, for its peerless grace will always inspire, even after you've frantically licked your plate clean like a rabid baboon.

While its consumption does wonders for the gobbler, the physical preparation of pie edifies the culinarian even further.  Our fast-paced world of marketing hustlers and canned sandwiches is relentless in its attempt to erase the personal touch of the small craftsman, forever pushing speed and comfort over thoughtful complexity in its race to sell as much cheap slop as possible.  Before long dinner will be piped into every household through a national system of pneumatic tubes, delivering canisters of hot, vitamin-enriched melted cheese at the hour of your choosing, all for a reasonable monthly fee paid electronically to AmeriTrough Inc, a Halliburton-Kraft Foods joint venture.  The sifting, cutting, mixing, rolling, and baking that pie production entails is revolutionary in its antagonism towards this dismal trend.

One can also trace the evolution of Western civilization by following the development of pie from its origins in antiquity.  Though stuffing bread with assorted ingredients had been practiced for centuries, the Greeks were the first to combine fat with flour to make pastry crust as we know it today.  Usually filled with meat, these primitive pies were eaten on epic sea voyages celebrated for their heroism, violence, death, and glory.  Baking in Athens was the work of female slaves, whose daily toil provided for a vast intellectual class that leisurely theorized about democracy and ethics.  The Romans picked up where the Greeks left off, adding various spices to the pies they brought to Europe via their expansive highway system, establishing law and order as they went through savage barbarian lands courageously plundering everything in sight.

The barbarians had the last laugh, however, and by the time the Empire had collapsed into ruin, the isolated communities of Europe were left to carry on the legacy of pie as local circumstances dictated.  The strange and inbred nobility of the medieval era took time out from killing each other to cram everything from dead birds to organ meats into pie shells, which were often used as tough, disposable casings for the real meal inside.  The crusts were thrown out and gathered by local church officials to give to the poor, who in turn thanked Providence for the half-eaten scraps and the fortuity of being lepers in so charitable a dungeon.

Eventually a small religious sect in England, where the word pie was first recorded, decided to take their baking skills to America, where they discovered that filling pies with the native berries of their new environment was almost as much fun as lighting people on fire.  Pie culture reached its peak in 1909, when Ben Turpin made history as the first person on film to be hit in the face with a pie.

To continue the march of human progress you'll need the following:

2 1/3 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

2/3 cup rendered lard*

6 tablespoons cold water

4 cups rhubarb

1 2/3 cups sugar

2 tablespoons butter

Preheat over to 400 degrees.  Slice rhubarb into 1-inch pieces.  Combine with sugar, 1/3 cup flour and a dash of salt.  Toss until well-mixed.  Let stand for fifteen minutes.

Meanwhile, sift two cups of flour and one teaspoon of salt into a large bowl.  Cut room temperature lard into the sifted flour with two knives or a pastry blender until the lard is reduced to the size of small peas.  Sprinkle one tablespoon of water over a small area of the mixture, toss with a fork, and push to the side of the bowl.  Repeat until all of the water is used and the mixture is thoroughly moistened.  Form into two balls.  Flatten each ball with the edge of your hand on a lightly floured surface until about a 1/2-inch thick, then roll until 1/8-inch thick.  Put one pastry into a 9-inch pie tin, cut the other into strips.  Fill the tin with the rhubarb mixture.  Divide butter into eight small pieces and distribute evenly across the top of the filling.  Crisscross pastry strips across the top of the pie, about one inch apart, pinching the ends into the edge of the lower pastry.  Bake for 50 minutes.  Makes one pie.

Now your kitchen has reached maturity.  The very nature of pie making is authentically meditative, for the baggage of life's distractions are naturally discarded when the mind is focused on chores of the present.  Ego sheds itself as one suspends obsession with past follies and future challenges, redirecting mental energy to completion of the task at hand.  Following through to its sweet conclusion empowers the spirit with the reminder that tangible victories, however small, are indeed attainable.  By the time the pie is out of the oven your brain will have repatterned itself upon a foundation of selfless devotion to process and diligent finesse.  May every kitchen serve as an incubator for insight and a base for the reclamation of our fading culture.

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*Vegetable shortening can be substituted for lard in a pinch, but lard is vastly superior.  Vegetable shortening won't make your pie nearly as flaky and is often derived from hydrogenated vegetable oils, which contain trans fats.  Lard is often bleached or treated with chemical preservatives, so be sure to buy leaf lard, the least porky tasting hog fat on the market and least likely to be laden with chemicals.  If you can't buy rendered leaf lard, you're going to have to render it yourself, by following these simple instructions:

Cut about two and half pounds of fat into 1/2-inch cubes.  Remove any visible chunks of pig tissue.  Place into a large pot, add about 1/2 cup of water.  Simmer for about one hour, stirring regularly.  By then the water should have evaporated and the fat will be melting.  Bits of tissue will start to form and float to the top.  When these "cracklings" drop to the bottom of the pot, turn off the stove and strain out the cracklings by pouring the liquid fat through a mesh sieve into jars or a metal bowl.  Allow the rendered lard to cool until white and solid, several hours or overnight.  Now bask in the thick scent of your freshly porkened house.

Butterscotch-Pecan Cinnamon Rolls

Some mornings are worth honoring with protracted ritual.  Perhaps the night before you found a duffel bag full of gold bullion and fancy cheeses, and are in the mood to celebrate.  Or maybe you woke up with a chipped tooth and your eyebrows shaved off and just need to do something active while reevaluating your life.  Whatever the reason, there are fewer activities more befitting the day's early hours than patiently following the steps necessary to craft a batch of homemade cinnamon rolls.  Indispensable among these is the leavening of dough.

Ancient Egypt is home to the first recorded instance of leavening, or adding yeast to dough to rise bread that would otherwise be hard and flat.  Protected from the west by the Sahara Desert, east by the Red Sea, north by the Mediterranean, and south by the rugged terrain of the African heartland, the Egyptians had little incentive to do much more than build monuments to themselves and drink beer.  The fermentation of bronze-age hooch traditionally occurred in the same physical quarters as bread, and thus we can see how civilization grew out of humankind's natural appetite for fat loaves and strong drink.

So get started:

Phase I: The Dough

1 package (9 grams) active dry yeast

1/2 cup warm water

1/2 cup room temperature milk

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup room temperature butter

1 teaspoon salt

1 egg

3 1/2 cups flour

Dissolve yeast into warm water in large bowl.  Let sit for five minutes.  Stir in milk, sugar, butter, salt, egg, and two cups of flour.  Beat until smooth.  Mix in remaining flour to firm up dough.  Place dough on lightly floured surface, knead about five minutes until smooth and elastic.  Place in greased bowl, then flip so greasy side is up.  Cover bowl with a cloth, let rise for 1 1/2 hours or until double in size in a warm area, i.e. by a radiator or vent.

Phase II: The Butterscotch

1/2 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

4 tablespoons corn syrup

1 cup pecan halves

Heat butter until melted, combine with brown sugar, corn syrup, and pecan halves in medium bowl.  Pour mixture into two 9x9x2 inch pans.

Phase III: The Rolls

1 wad of dough (above)

4 tablespoons of room temperature butter

1/2 cup sugar

4 tablespoons ground cinnamon

On lightly floured surface, roll dough into two 15x9 inch rectangles.  Spread butter on top surface of each rectangle.  Mix cinnamon and sugar, spread over rectangle.  Tightly roll up rectangles into fifteen-inch long cylinders, slice each roll into nine separate pieces.  Place pieces in butterscotch-coated pans.  Let rise for 40 more minutes.  Heat over to 375 degrees.  Bake until golden brown, 25-30 minutes.

Phase IV: The Glaze

2 cups powdered sugar

3 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix powdered sugar, milk and vanilla in medium bowl until well combined.  When the baking is completed, remove the pans from the oven and turn them upside down over a large plate so the rolls plop down into a gooey pile.  Drizzle the butterscotch coating over the rolls, followed by the glaze.  Serve hot.  Makes eighteen.

Cinnamon rolls are but a modest extension of bread's humble beginnings, though with a little more complexity, as suits our superior culture of napalm and billboards.  The leavening can be time-consuming, but that combined with the baking allows you to relax, make coffee, read the paper, doze off, and almost burn the house down.  Should worse come to worst, the adrenaline jolt triggered by the smoke alarm will probably keep you fully alert until bedtime, a successful state of affairs if there ever was one.  But should your rolls actually survive and mature to completion, rest assured that you've framed your morning well, both with a memorable process and an incomparable plate of soft, warm, sweetness.

Corned Beef with Colcannon and Soda Bread

It is perhaps against my better judgment to reveal a closely guarded recipe forged in the immortal hovels of my forebears, but because I'm in the mood I'll do it anyway.  The traditional value of devotion to family has been under attack from the traditional value of personal liberty for a long time, so this exposition shouldn't cause any more of a scandal than America's declining number of arranged marriages or the neon-lit Taco Bell serving Cheesy McFritters on my deceased grandfather's memorial plot back in Iowa.  It's all about convenience, right?

Corned beef with colcannon and soda bread is the kind of meal that sticks to your ribs.  The thicker your beard and more calloused your hands, the greater the chemistry will be between you, the food, and the wood you just chopped out back after punching a grizzly bear in the face.  A mélange of sorts, its basic components work neatly with one another to make a reliable plate of comfort neither excessively adventuresome nor terminally bland.  As every part is served steaming hot, it's best cooked during that dark time of year when salads are useless and adding layers of doughy husk to your cold, frail being is an imperative matter of survival.

To stuff yourself appropriately gather the following:

The Meat--

5 pounds corned beef brisket

The Sauce--

1/2 cup sour cream

1/4 cup horseradish

The Colcannon--

5 large peeled potatoes

1 bunch green kale

1 cup 2% milk

1 stick and 1 tablespoon butter

1 leek

1 yellow onion

1/3 cup chives

1/4 cup garlic

1 teaspoon of salt

The Soda Bread--

3 cups flour

3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 tablespoon salt

9 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoon caraway

1/2 cup golden raisins

1/3 cup currants

1 cup buttermilk

Start by dumping the brisket into a large pot.  Fill the pot with water up to the top of the meat.  Bring to a boil, then simmer for 4-6 hours, the longer the better.

While the meat's cooking, you can peel the potatoes.  Then cut each potato into six pieces and finely chop the kale, onion, and leek.  For those of you unfamiliar with leeks, discard the green leafy top part two inches above the white middle section and throw away the very bottom tip-o-the-leek with roots.  Dump the potatoes into a large pot, then fill with water up to the top of the potatoes.  Boil potatoes until soft, about 15-20 minutes.  Sauté the chopped vegetables in a pan coated with one tablespoon of butter until soft.  Drain out the water in the potato pot, mash them 'taters, then add the sautéed vegetables.  Add one stick of butter and one cup of milk, stirring until well blended.  Heat on low.  Ten minutes before serving, stir in chopped garlic, chives, salt.

For the soda bread, preheat oven at 375 degrees.  Combine flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl.  Cut nine tablespoons of butter into the mixture with a pastry blender, or the old fashioned way, with two knives until the butter is reduced to pea-sized pieces.  Mix in caraway, raisins, currants.  Add buttermilk, stir until evenly moistened, though not too much or you'll toughen the bread.  Gather into a ball, knead until turned over about sixteen times.  Gather into a new ball, pad down until one inch thick.  Put on a greased baking sheet, cut an "X" 1/4 inch deep across the top.  Brush lightly with milk for a shiny top.  Cook 30-35 minutes until golden brown, rotate pan halfway through.

When everything's ready, drain out the water from the meat pot and slice up the corned beef.  Now mix the sour cream and horseradish in a small dish to serve with the brisket.  Sweet cream butter is a mandatory condiment for the soda bread, while a tall stout or porter completes the bouquet.  Serves five people, with plenty of meat leftover.

There once was a time when this was Poor People Food, as potatoes were the only thing that could be grown in any abundance in the thin, rocky soil reserved for the majority of people on a certain occupied island across the Atlantic that shall go nameless.  When a massive blight wiped out their potato crop, the only other food on the island was being grown on the mega-estates of their conquerors, who found it more profitable to export the agricultural surplus to other countries.  Starvation followed, and many of the survivors fled to the United States, where potatoes were plentiful and cured brisket was cheaper than pork.  Back on the island, pigs were the most affordable source of animal protein owing to their mystical ability to convert filth into meat.  But in America, cattle is King, and the newcomers adapted accordingly.

Personally, all dead animal tastes good enough for the likes of me, but the common potato has been a bitter antagonist of mine for years.  For as long as I can remember, it was a ubiquitous, constant, and unyielding source of distress, and as justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere, in the spirit of solidarity I invite you to join me in punishing it brutally without delay.  Skinning and boiling it alive is indeed properly torturous, but the medieval insult of warping its very essence beyond recognition is the kind of rough penalty most suitable for such a villain.  The trick with potatoes is to serve them in a form that doesn't resemble a potato, with its starchy, flavorless nature transformed into something quite the opposite: creamy and rich, as most of us prefer.  After all, it's all about convenience.