Isn't it a beaut? Craggly edges of a homemade pie crust, and the puffed bronze top of this recipe I found in Anita Stewart's Canada. I started making this pie years ago, back when I was so young that I emailed the author about whether I could freeze this pie, hoping maybe, by dint of asking, I could force a magic yes. She answered no. Of course not, I now think. But this pie is so good, you wish you could make a dozen and store them for the future. You can't though. This pie is meant to be ephemeral. First, it's made with rhubarb which is only harvested in spring and summer. Second, its custard-like filling is folded with beaten egg whites which aren’t meant to be frozen. I like the pie most of all because it is unique... it blends rhubarb with orange juice and orange zest, unlike the more typical rhubarb-strawberry pairing. The recipe is called “Four-Generation Rhubarb Pie” because its source, a man named Fred Gordon who gave the recipe to Anita Stewart, says that it can be traced back to his Grandmother's mom. Both the story, and Stewart's adjectives convinced me to try the dessert promptly.
I feel like such a recipe is the very opposite thing of what Nora Ephron wrote about in her 1973 article titled “Baking Off”. She wrote then about attending the “twenty-fourth annual Pillsbury Bake-Off” that seemed to me to be as depressing an experience as David Foster Wallace's taking a cruise. In “Baking Off”, Nora Ephron writes that “to win the Pillsbury Bake-Off, even to be merely a finalist in it, is to be a great housewife. And a creative housewife. ‘Cooking is very creative.’ I must have heard that line thirty times as I interviewed the finalists. I don’t happen to think that cooking is very creative - what interests me about it is, on the contrary, its utter mindlessness and mathematical certainty.”
I will not argue here about whether or not cooking is creative - I have only to think of Deb Perelman to be awed by culinary creativity. Instead, what a recipe titled “Four-Generation Rhubarb Pie” represents is an honouring of ingredients that is so different from the corporate event Ephron describes as to be on another plane. It brings to mind this quote from the novel South Wind by Norman Douglas, which Elizabeth David used in A Book of Mediterranean Food: “All culinary tasks should be performed with reverential love, don’t you think so?”