Hello, Blueberry-Peach Pie

My deep, abiding affection for pie is a mark of my adulthood. As a child, I felt that pie resided at the very bottom of the preferred dessert list. I opted for cake, cookies, ice cream – usually, anything that had the potential to involve chocolate. As I have matured, however, and my appreciation for foods made from growing things has played an increasingly central role in my diet, I have developed quite a passion for crumbles, crisps, bettys, cobblers, buckles, and of course, pie. For dessert, naturally, but also reheated in the morning for breakfast, accompanied by nothing more than a steaming cup of coffee.

Pie, in my opinion, is only worth eating if it’s homemade and from scratch. I’d rather forego pies involving boxed pudding mix or canned pie filling, and forget about pre-made boxed pie from the freezer section of the grocery store. I simply feel that homemade pie is worth the time and effort. The only exception to this is the use of what I call “cheater pie crust,” the ready-to-bake sort that comes rolled up in a box, and is found in the refrigerated section of the market. I have no problem admitting that when I’m pressed for time, this is how I cheat. I open the box, unroll the crust, give it a few quick caresses with my rolling pin, and into the pie plate it goes. The reason this kind of pie crust works is its fat content: lard. Don’t be horrified by this; hands down, the best pie crust is made with lard, although most recipes these days call for butter. Lard seems to gross people out, but I see it as no different from eating any animal product – it’s just fat, nothing more. According to Nina Planck, former manager of the New York City farmers’ markets, author of Real Food, and an advocate for the return to a pre-industrial diet, lard is not bad. It is a natural saturated fat, which the body needs in reasonable amounts. Food writer Pete Wells extolled the delicious results of cooking with natural lard in “Lard: The New Health Food?” in the December 2005 edition of Food & Wine. So don’t fear lard, although if you decide to cook with it yourself, you’ll want to buy it unprocessed from a butcher or check the package label to ensure it hasn’t been hydrogenated into a trans fat. But enough about lard.

A few weeks ago, keen on a second attempt at Blueberry Boy Bait (see previous post), I ambitiously bought a five-pound box of blueberries at the Fulton Street Farmers’ Market. Early August is blueberry season in southwestern Michigan, and the berries are fat, sweet, and cheap. I love them – in pancakes, on my cereal, in smoothies, stirred into my yogurt – but even I didn’t know what to do with a whole five pounds of them. My eyes were bigger than my blueberry recipe repertoire. Ultimately, I was saved by some dangerously ripe Michigan peaches and a flash of ingenuity.

August is also peach season in Michigan. The same Saturday morning that I came home with my five-pound box of blue booty, I brought along a quart of just-picked, just-ripe peaches, bright green leaves still clinging to their stems. I set them on my counter to ripen a little more, got busy, and forgot about them until they were suddenly soft all over, and it was clear I’d never be able to eat them all before they were overripe.

“I have to do something with these,” I thought, “but what?” Peach cobbler, peach pie…I stood there in the middle of my tiny kitchen, hands on my hips, chewing on my bottom lip and thinking. Reaching for the handle of the refrigerator door, I opened it, and my eyes fell on the box of cheater pie crust I’d purchased the day before, with those remaining pounds of blueberries and blueberry pie in mind.

Blueberry pie? Or peach pie? Or…blueberry-peach pie? Was there even such a thing?

I pulled out The Joy of Cooking. No luck. I grabbed my MacBook and searched epicurious.com. Nothing. (Later, I googled “blueberry peach pie” and discovered that epicurious.com has a recipe for “Peach Blueberry Pie,” but it’s more work-intensive than what I came up with on my own, because it calls for scalding the peaches in boiling water, which seems silly to me when you’re about to bake them for an hour.)

Going back to my copy of Joy, I looked up Irma Rombauer’s recipes for blueberry and peach pie. I read both recipes multiple times, noting quantities of fruit, sugar, and thickener, making mental adjustments in my mind, and jotting down an impromptu recipe on a slip of paper. Over the next half hour, I washed berries, peeled and cut peaches, stirred fruit, sugar, lemon juice, and cornstarch together, and gave my cheater pie crust a bit of final attention.

An hour later, just as Eli and I finished dinner, I took the product of my on-the-fly inspiration from the oven, and my apartment filled with an amazing aroma. I cut two pieces, scooped some vanilla ice cream onto our plates beside the pie, and we settled onto the couch. We each took a bite, and looked at each other. Sweet, tender chunks of peach mingled with the juicy berries, the two flavors surprisingly complementary.

“Ohhhhhh…” Eli sighed.

I raised my eyebrows at him.

“It’s soooo good,” he said by way of an explanation, and gulped down another bite.

That was all the affirmation I needed.

Crust for a 9″ double-crust pie

For the filling, mix together:

6 medium ripe peaches, peeled and cut into chunks

4 cups ripe blueberries

3/4 cup sugar

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1/4 cup cornstarch

For finishing:

1 lightly beaten egg and raw cane sugar