The Pie Crust Gauntlet

Making my favorite food by feel, after years of struggling.

I recently found the work of Joseph Cornell through my new favorite book, Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory¹. The glass-fronted boxes containing refuse, trinkets, and lifeless objects that Cornell alchemized into art remind Stepanova of sekretiki, a game that Soviet-era children played in which they would hide tiny beautiful things underground, or under floor boards. Occasionally, she writes, you would return to a treasure burial site and find nothing: either you’d lost your bearings, or the secret had traveled deeper underground, as if injected into hidden veins of gold.

Stepanova’s writing on Cornell’s sacred stuff summoned one of my starkest grade school memories. I had an unimaginably kind and gentle second grade teacher, Miss Morine, who was so petite that the thing I remember most of her engagement announcement was the fact that the ring hung off her finger like a hula hoop. When she got married and became Mrs. Maney, our entire class was invited to her ceremony, and sat in the balcony at the small white church at Manchester’s seaside, straining our necks to see her white dress below us.

One unspecial day in school, someone brought in chocolate cupcakes. I housed mine, and then began folding up the refuse it left behind, that thin wax paper liner softened from time in the oven and caked with a dark, clinging coat of crumbs. I was able to fold it five or six times before it became a sliver of itself; when unfolded it revealed a striking geometric pattern, a mystical chocolate asterisk. I thought it was beautiful: my first encounter with trash art. I walked up to Miss Morine, and presented my strange gift. She saw it and laughed, and threw it in the trash. 

Along with parrots, seashells, and the midcentury American actress Rose Hobart, Joseph Cornell loved chocolate cake. Curator Martin Friedman knew this, and when he visited the Flushing, Queens, house where Cornell lived his entire life² (1903-1972), he brought with him an “elaborate” chocolate cake, boxed and bound in ribbons. Friedman hoped to sell Cornell on a long-term loan—and maybe the eventual acquisition—of some of the artist’s boxes, which he almost never sold. 

According to Friedman’s account of their meeting, Cornell was quiet and guarded, but lit up at the gift, carefully lifting it from its box and placing it his refrigerator next to two or three more untouched chocolate cakes. Cornell eventually allowed Friedman the privilege of entering his basement studio, and prepared them a hilariously drab lunch: a can of tuna, oil and all, served over some flaccid lettuce. Our narrator could only choke down a few bites while dreaming of dessert. Cornell wouldn’t serve the cake, though; he was saving it for later in the forbidden curio case of his fridge. 

I keep thinking about that fridge: empty but for a bit of lettuce and three towering cakes, confections turned to trinkets. Who knows how or when or if Cornell ate them, or if he simply stole a look at them every few hours, the glaring appliance light reflecting off of their chocolate ganache. Unlike Thiebaud’s showy cakes gleaming in shop windows, Cornell treated his like private dreams kept in a locked notebook, an edible expression of his Surrealist influences. Good on him for not letting some frothy museum curator dig into his precious treasure! (Friedman and the Walker Art Center did, eventually, receive that loan.)

I have always dreamed of having a sparsely populated refrigerator—its cavity gleaming white but for a jug of milk and a bit of fish and, like, an endive. Instead I treat my fridge like Cornell treated his studio: I pack it with bits and bobs that I promise myself I’ll someday use. Even my small fridge here in Germany is at capacity right now; as people leave the residency, we who remain inherit their pantries.

When I open it, a bit of parchment leaps out at me from a shoddy wrap job. On Monday I made Natasha Pickowicz’s (via Tejal Rao) Potato-and-Radicchio Tart³, which I’ve riffed on a number of times before but never made true to the recipe. It was my friend GG’s last night here, and we had plans to watch the most recent episode of The White Lotus. I’ve cooked for the group at potlucks here, but never just for one person, and I miss the near-embarrassing intimacy of making something more extravagant than necessary for a friend on a weeknight. Of opening up the cupcake wrapper and hoping they like it.

While prepping my tart, I encountered a brief hiccup: nowhere in this town can I find a measuring cup. When I dry-brined a weird hen last month, I had to use a shot glass to measure my salt. Measuring flour for the pie crust would be tricky, but I was determined to follow my plan through. In the communal kitchen, I found a fascinating plastic pitcher that has liquid measurements (in ml) on one side, and weight equivalents for flour and sugar on the other. So: this much is 400 grams of flour, this much is 600. With a bit of Google equivalency math I did my best to measure three cups of flour for two rounds of crust—always make more than you need—and figured out, I thought, the right amount of butter (not in sticks, but listed in grams). 

The last decade has been, for me, a journey towards good pie dough. Pie crust is one of my favorite foods, but I’m not a baker, and its finnicky process—your butter must be cold! don’t add too much water! touch the dough as little as possible!—always terrified me. When I was an editor I used to make pie experts like Erin McDowell and Ben Mims tutor me in crust; that experience, plus the intervening years of trial and error, have given me a basic sense of how the process should go, and how the dough should feel. I am not an expert, but I’m usually proud of what I make. 

After mixing my butter into my flour mixture and beginning to add the water, it became clear my ratios were off: I guess I hadn’t used enough flour. The dough was coming together too easily and starting to feel—you never want this!—wet. I tossed in a few more handfuls of flour until it looked like something I’d seen before, kneaded⁴ the mixture together in the bowl until it was mostly smooth, divided it in two, and let the discs—wrapped in plastic—rest in the fridge.

In some freak fluke of luck, this pie dough was the best I’ve ever made, probably because of an outsize proportion of butter: it was flaky and golden and light, and the tart itself was so good we giggled over it. You’ve got to make it. We had seconds! We stayed up late watching YouTube analysis of the episode and GG cracked the code! I’ve been eating leftovers all week. After I finish writing this, I’ll kill the last slice.

Beige! The post-radicchio version was less photogenic, more delicious.

I figured this was a good time as any to explain my pie crust strategy. Sorry to anyone who could’ve used this at Thanksgiving, but anyways the best pie is one with ample leftovers, which you can eat cold from the fridge for breakfast all week. I’ll be using the second round, which awaits me in the freezer, to make a caramelized onion galette for the next potluck. 

As with anything, the only way to get good at pie is to make it a hundred times, unless you’re one of those inherent pastry savants, in which case, please send me a box of chocolate cake, festooned with ribbons and meant only for me. For the rest of you, no time like the present to practice.

Here’s how I make pie crust: