by Bill Heavey
Then she pointed out her sour cherry. It was not a tree. It was a bush, not much taller than I was, and spindly looking. The cherry grew out of the short, steep, untended bank of dirt between the street and the stairs leading up to the front door. With a folding pruning saw, I could have cut the thing down and carried it away under one arm. “Not a whole lot to it, is there?” I said, tying on my blickey and trying to tamp down my disappointment. It was impossible to imagine a more unremarkable shrub. Nor, for that matter, did I see many cherries on it, at least not at first. Paula ignored me. She was already on her knees and picking the lower branches. I heard the gentle thwap of the first cherries hitting the bottom of the paper grocery bag.
As I studied the bush, though, I started to see the fruit. There were actually quite a few cherries, if you looked closely. And if you squatted so that you were looking up at the underside of a given branch rather than the other way around, you saw even more. I was soon engrossed in picking from this position, digging in my heels to keep from sliding down the hill. It was a posture that engaged certain lower back muscles I’d never used before. You almost needed to be a circus contortionist to get at some of the higher-up fruit, though. At one point, standing to stretch my back again, I realized that there might be just enough room for me to squeeze in next to the one open spot near the trunk and pick from the inside. Folding and unfolding myself between the branches, I finally arrived at this place. The view from here was one of amazing abundance. There were cherries in every direction. The problem was that I could barely move. I snaked one hand up and bent the topmost branch down gently, then stood on tiptoe to get every last cherry. Frequently I would reach for a cherry and grab only air. The cherry was actually a foot nearer or farther than it appeared. The optical illusion, I finally realized, was because the place was so crowded with branches and fruit that often only one eye had a clear view of what I was after.
The cherries were deep red, almost purple. They felt soft and juicy. I put one into my mouth and winced at the tartness. There’s a forager’s joke about bitter edibles to the effect that “the second one tastes better than the first,” meaning that once your palate gets past the initial shock of a new tart or bitter taste, you quickly acclimate and begin to taste “past” that to the other, more subtle flavors. That was the deal here. After the first few, the taste improved considerably. I wasn’t entirely sure I liked it. On the other hand, I kept wanting more. The things were astringent, no question, but also dark and concentrated, a taste that seemed the very essence of cherries. I forced myself to stop eating, realizing that I really did want enough for a pie.
The idea of my first pie had begun to grow in my head. I’d never made a pie, had never had even the faintest desire to make one, and questioned the wisdom of those who did. But I seemed to be edging up sidewise to the notion, as was my fashion. Now that I thought about it, I realized I’d never seen sour cherries in a store or restaurant. And yet I was already beginning to think of myself as a connoisseur of the fruit. There were substantial variations in taste among the cherries even on this one tree, some more watery, others more concentrated. There were even variations among cherries of matching color from a single tree. Wow, I thought, you’re turning into one of the very people whose preciousness you detest. Keep this up and pretty soon you’ll turn into one of those whack jobs who can’t stop talking about the time they tasted hand-harvested, unfiltered olive oil in Italy that had been pressed by eunuchs between two pieces of marble stolen from the Colosseum in the fifth century.
Picking keeps your hands busy. And even as part of my mind was already lost to abundance mania—focused on the next cherry and the next and the next—another part was wandering in the wider world of cherries. Consider supermarket cherries. I had no idea how far they might have to travel or what kind of shelf life was required in the produce aisle, but it stood to reason that a grower would have plenty of incentive to breed fruit that would ship well—that didn’t bruise or collapse easily and that remained firm, if not exactly “ripe,” for extended periods—and little reason to breed for flavor. These cherries seemed like the very opposite of the fruit required to make money on a large scale. They were pure cherry, succulent meat from skin to stone. They felt fragile in the hand, as if the weight of even three or four would crush the one beneath. I began to feel for the cherries at the bottom of my blickey. I worried that the guys on the bottom might not be doing so well.
But I consoled myself with the thought that they were all headed for the oven. This fruit, I realized, was at absolute peak ripeness. I had no idea how long these cherries would stay that way, but my sense was that it was likely measured in hours rather than days. I’d seen wineberries that weren’t ready one day turn overripe the next. It seemed plausible that this fruit might yet last a day or two on the tree—and equally plausible that it wouldn’t last even that long.
“Wow,” I murmured to Paula as I caught myself eating another one, “These are intense.” She was still picking the outside, stepping back now and then to look for areas that still had fruit. “Like I said,” she replied, paying only marginal attention to anything outside the endless physical mantra of reaching and picking; “best fuckin’ sour cherry in the city. You get all the high ones? There were a bunch I couldn’t reach.” I assured her the high ones had been plucked. I was getting everything I could reach, and pulling myself up to get as many others as possible.
At last, even Paula was satisfied. “I think we’ve picked this baby about as clean as we can,” she said. “You good to go?” I was. I had about a blickey and a half of cherries in a plastic bag. Paula assured me it was plenty for a pie.
On the way home, feeling expansive from my little epiphany, I confessed to Paula how surprised I was by the tree’s productivity, by its location, and that it nonetheless remained more or less unknown. “You know how many people walk by this tree every day and never think to pick a cherry?” she said, her voice rising with indignation. “Gotta be hundreds, maybe thousands. Because nobody gives a fuck. They want fruit from Bolivia or someplace that’s grown in monkey shit and handled by people with God knows what diseases. But if it looks nice in the supermarket they’re happy. You could take fucking crabgrass to the produce section, arrange it all nice and pretty, and as long as it’s under those fluorescent lights and those things, whattya call ’em, that spray water in your face when—”
“Misters,” I say.
“—Yeah, fucking misters. And all they do is make the shit that much heavier so they can charge you more for it. But as long as it’s all nice and laid out like that, people will buy it.”
We drove on in rare silence for a few moments. Then she asked if I even knew how to make a pie. I resented her for assuming that I’d never made a pie. And I specifically resented her for being right. I knew more about Ethiopian import restrictions on fennel than I did about making pies. “Okay, listen to me,” she said. “First, don’t rinse these cherries when you get home. The only fruit you rinse and scrub is apples. Besides, we’ve had tons of rain recently. You don’t think that’s cleaned them off? And if there’s a bug in them, so what? You’re cooking the damn thing, aren’t you?”
She asked if I owned a copy of The Joy of Cooking. As a matter of fact I did. It was a long-ago Christmas gift from my mother back when she still hoped I might learn to cook. It was also the only cookbook I owned. No points from Paula, though. “Is it before 1978?” she asked. It was from 1992, I said. “Too bad. They changed ’em after that. Maybe it was 1979. Anyway, they took out all the good stuff: how to skin and stew a squirrel or a possum, how to cook a raccoon, all that stuff.” Paula had eaten raccoon, of course, but it wasn’t something she’d go out of her way for. “Anyway, The Joy of Cooking is what you want. Follow the recipe for the fresh cherry pie.” She proceeded as if my pie education had somehow fallen to her. Which, in fact, it had.
Once Paula shouldered a responsibility—regardless of how it had devol
ved to her—she took it seriously. Part of instructing me in making pie evidently included describing all the ways I could screw it up. It was clear she didn’t think it would help much. It was more a question of her having a clean conscience after the train wreck.
“Okay, when you start mixing in the fruit, sugar, and tapioca? The tapioca box has a little note on it that says, ‘Shake before using.’ They mean that. Don’t ask me why, but you gotta do it.
“If they give you a range of sugar to use, say one and a quarter to one and a half, cups always go for the larger amount. I’m not a sweet tooth kind of person. It just makes the thing taste better.” (This, incidentally, is completely false. Paula’s pies were a dentist’s dream. But the filing cabinet of Paula’s mind had peculiar divisions. Liking sweet pies was, by her lights, very different from “having a sweet tooth.” One was a matter of personal taste, while the other was a character flaw.)
“Buy the premade piecrusts. Everybody will tell you that they’re easy to make. That’s bullshit. Trust me.
“Now, look, you start the pie hot, at 450, to brown the crust. Then, after fifteen minutes, you cut the oven down to 350 for the rest of the time. And when you put the pie in the oven, you gotta crimp tinfoil over the edges of the crust. Otherwise it gets burned, which you do not want.”
By this time, I was beginning to understand why no one made pies anymore. What a huge pain in the ass! I had loved picking cherries, but by this time my desire to make a pie had vanished. It was, however, too late. If I backed out now I’d never hear the end of it.
Paula had fallen silent, leading me to think our little talk was over. It wasn’t. She was just reviewing to see if she’d left anything out. “Always put a cookie sheet underneath the pie,” she said. “The thing bubbles over and then you have to clean the whole fucking oven. By the way, when the filling bubbles up, it’s done. Take it out and let it cool.”
I felt oddly like a soldier on the last day of basic training, my drill sergeant imparting her final words before I headed off to war. Having passed on the essential facts about pies, Paula again fell quiet. This lasted nearly a minute. Then, out of the blue, she told me with some adamancy that I should give the pie to my mother. “Mothers like that,” she said. “She cooked for you her whole life. Now you return the favor.” This was odd. There was a whole iceberg submerged in there, and this was just the tip of it, but my attempts to get her to amplify went nowhere. “I just think you should give it to your mother,” she said. “But do what you want.” And with that we were at Gordon’s and she got out. I thanked her for showing me the tree. I meant it. She took very few people into her confidence, and doing so clearly made her uncomfortable. “Yeah, yeah,” she said impatiently, flitting away acknowledgement as if it were a swarm of gnats. Then she leaned in and said, “Listen, don’t forget about the cookie sheet.”
After picking Emma up at school, I tried to pitch the pie as an adventure we would undertake together. To my surprise, Em was eager to help in the first step, pitting the fruit. I had her stand on a stool so we could work side by side at the sink, expelling the pits into a small bowl, the cherries into a large one. It was pleasant to be doing this together. It was nice, for once, not being the Homework Monster or the Bedtime Enforcer. I was a dad making something with his daughter. This daddy-daughter domestic arts quality time lasted for all of ninety seconds, about five cherries each. One side effect of the process was the occasional wayward squirt of juice. By pure chance, Emma’s first squirt went straight up into her face. “Gross!” she wailed, as if she’d been slimed by a giant oyster, and fled the kitchen. I sighed, the all-too-familiar feeling of not knowing what the hell to do enveloping me. I could have forced her to pit cherries, but that would just have made her resentful. I could think of nothing more constructive than to let her be for the moment and continue on my own.
Two quarts of cherries had looked like a lot. Pitted, the fruit looked sort of crestfallen and reduced, barely filling a nine-inch pie pan. I poured the fruit-sugar-flour-tapioca mixture into the store-bought piecrust. (In between dropping off Paula and picking up Emma, I had made three trips to the store to find the right kind of crust. This was because I fell prey—twice—to the various types of imposter graham cracker crust lurking in the baking aisle. I had reasoned, mistakenly, that all the piecrusts would cohabitate in a single supermarket aisle. Finally, I called Paula from the store. “The real piecrusts are in the refrigerated section for Chrissake. Usually right next to the butter. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?” I bought two of the only kind of real piecrusts I saw, which were already in nine-inch foil pie plates.)
After adding the fruit mixture to one crust-plate, I attempted to ease the second crust from its dish to make the top. This did not go well. The more gingerly I handled it, the faster it disintegrated. I was soon holding the pastry equivalent of Stanley Kowalski’s T-shirt. Finally I lost it, ripped the rest of the crust out with my bare hands, and molded it into a lumpy globe of aromatic Play-Doh. Which I then realized that I would need to flatten again. It was at this point that I discovered I didn’t own a rolling pin. There had been no particular reason to think that I did, other than the fact that I own a great many kitchen utensils that I never use and whose functions elude me. Anyway, there was no rolling pin in the drawer that serves as the Tomb of Unknown Utensils. I had, however, heard somewhere that a wine bottle made an acceptable substitute, and wine bottles were something I always had on hand. Sprinkling flour onto my big plastic cutting board, I attempted the bottle trick. After a while I realized that you also had to flour the wine bottle. Even so, the thinnest I could uniformly roll the dough resulted in something still thick enough to chock the wheel of a farm tractor. I was approaching the end of my tether. There was flour all over the kitchen which, after an hour of preheating the oven, was very warm. It was seven p.m. I’d been at it for two hours, still had no pie in the oven, and had yet to consider what I would feed my child for supper.
In desperation, I went to my next-door neighbor’s house and borrowed a rolling pin. This made no difference whatsoever. I opened the floury bottle of wine, poured a large glass, and considered the fact that despite the laborsaving use of premade crusts, I wanted to break things. Ugly as the situation had gotten, I was determined to see this through. I began lifting the rolling pin and pressing it down in different spots, which gave the crust a sort of oceany effect: little wind-raised waves chasing each other over its surface. And yet it did result in a thinner crust. At least in some places.
I had noted the “lattice” crusts while reading the other parts in Joy about pies and had thought maybe I’d try it. Now, reading the actual process involved, I realized that they required you to literally weave the fucking crust over and under itself as if you were caning a chair. Soon as Jesus comes back, I thought, and decided instead to “float” the large pancake of dough atop the filling. I then spent twenty minutes and five yards of tinfoil trying to get the tinfoil to adhere to the edges of the goddamn crust. In the end, I finally got part of the crust on one half of the pie covered and slammed it into the oven.
Emma and I dined at Burger King that night. “You should make pie again,” she said.
An hour and twenty minutes after entering the oven, my first-ever pie emerged, the filling heaving slowly with volcanic purple bubbles. Amazingly, the crust had not burned. The pancake was golden brown. I was delighted. An hour later, the pie having cooled to a safe temperature, Emma and I sampled it. My child judged it too tart, although she gladly accepted the ice cream that went with it. As for me, I was amazed at my handiwork. It was wonderful. The crust was a little thick but intact. And the pie itself had a tantalizing tartness that perfectly offset the vanilla ice cream. I felt . . . “Promethean” is the word. I had stolen pie from the gods. It wasn’t the world’s first pie, but it was my first. Damn but I was proud. Was it not I who had purloined the fruit and pitted it? Was it not I who had initiated the chem
ical changes by which raw dough and fruit and sugar and well-shaken tapioca coalesced into a completely new thing—a pie? I am not ashamed to say that I polished off half the sucker in the first sitting, along with a pint of vanilla ice cream. I loved my mother, but she would have to wait. This was my pie. Then I decided to call Paula. “Made a pie with those cherries,” I said when she answered, appropriating her preemptive conversational style. As if prearranged, a burp began to form in my throat. “I’ll try to save you a piece,” I said, and then let the burp out loudly. “But I’m not promising anything.”
I hung up just as Paula began either laughing or cursing. Maybe both.
After my success making sour cherry pie, I began to feel I was getting somewhere. I had proved that it was possible not only for a theoretical person, but for a real one—me, for example—to go out, gather wild food, bring it home, and turn it not just into something edible but into something that you would actually want to pig out on while watching TV. (Not that I could do this, in the case of sour cherries, without butter, flour, sugar, tapioca, and salt. Almost everybody serving “wild food”—with the exception of really hard-core foragers like Sam Thayer—combines wild with non-wild ingredients.) Still, the notion that a dish based on wild food could in fact be a guilty pleasure, one not incompatible with sin generally and with gluttony in particular, was a breakthrough moment for me. It opened new vistas of hope and degradation. It restored some of the romance that Hue, with the best of intentions, had so thoroughly dashed when he pointed out that nearly every weed sprouting from the cracks in the sidewalk was a wild edible. Romance and guilty pleasure, at least in my mind, went hand in glove. And there were few pleasures, gustatorial or otherwise, as fully satisfying as guilty ones. They were the id’s delight. If McCormick’s lab people ever managed to synthesize guilty pleasure, imagine the condiment it would make. You’d be able to eat anything and enjoy it if you could just smother it with Guilty Pleasure. Although Guilty Pleasure Low Sodium and Guilty Pleasure Lite would inevitably follow.