In October of 2020 my dog Achilles collapsed while we were on an afternoon walk around my neighborhood and my entire world changed in a moment that I was not prepared for. The neighbor whose lawn we were passing came outside to help, and we loaded my sweet boy into the car and drove the couple of blocks down the street to my apartment, where he passed away soon after. It was the worst day of my life.
To say that I was a mess would be generous. I ate fast food garbage and soaked in a bath that went cold while watching Futurama for what could have been hours. Time passed very slowly and then ceased to exist altogether. In the hours since my life had changed, sometimes the mist of grief would gently dissipate and the pain would momentarily subside, almost as if I had forgotten what had happened and things were normal again for a sliver of time. While briefly suspended in one of the rare moments when I could breathe instead of choking down a sob, I decided that I needed something to focus on, something to do, a task to perform – anything to distract me from the pit of despair I had unwillingly found myself trapped in. I decided to focus on a task that would give me purpose and make my neighbor an apple pie as a gesture of gratitude for going out of his way to help me with my dog.
I don’t remember what recipe I used, but I deviated wildly from the instructions, adding an unmeasured amount of oats, blind baking the crust (why? why did I do this?), and altogether somehow utterly mangled it. The pie was hideous. It was an abomination. It was an Eldritch horror. It looked like I had baked the ten plagues of Egypt into a crust to serve à la mode. I simply could not present it to someone I was trying to thank, lest they suspect I was trying to curse or poison them instead. I have made plenty of pies in my life, but seemingly all manner of reason and common sense had outright fled from my mind while attempting to make this particular pie. Once more I was despondent, and thus I turned on the bath again.
My mom had called me several times throughout the day to check on me, and called me again to tell me she was at the airport intending to fly out to see me. I told her about the terrible pie and what I had done, and she half laughed, half sighed, and said, “Sweetie, why didn’t you use your grandma’s recipe?” I stood there, staring blankly at the abyss of my horrible baked transgression, and it stared back. Why hadn’t I used my grandma’s recipe? I hadn’t thought to. There was no good reason for that at all, because I had been in possession of her recipe book for years and had used it many times. “We’ll make another pie when I get there,” my mom assured me.
When she arrived that night, I showed my mom the pie and she laughed in the way that she does where she’s shaking from desperately, trying to keep the corners from her mouth from upturning and her lips closed because if she doesn’t, she will start cackling like a hyena; it’s the same way that I laugh. This was the exact reaction I had feared receiving from my neighbor, or anyone passing me as I walked to his home, and I instantly knew that I had made the correct decision by not encumbering another soul with the terrible pie. My mom said that we would find an apple corer the next day because it would make the process much easier, and we would make a new pie for my neighbor together.
My mom’s presence during that devastating time made things better in the way that only mothers can, especially when their children are in pain. We went thrifting and found an apple corer (because for some reason, there are always apple corers at thrift stores; it’s a guarantee they give you as shoppers) along with some other things, then went to the grocery store to find “the good apples” (Granny Smith apples). While we assembled The Good Pie, we reheated The Bad Pie and ate it with vanilla bean ice cream. Surprisingly, it tasted pretty good, despite looking like it had been constructed in an underground goblin kitchen.
We set up my newly-thrifted apple corer and it worked like magic, rotating the apples and curling the skin off of them in tart, juicy ribbons. We laid the crust in the pan and forked the edges, tossed the apples in butter and cinnamon and sugar and flour, dumped so many pieces into the pie crust that it resembled a small mountain, and then packed on the crumble until I was certain that it was too large and it would never bake properly. “No,” my mom said, “It’s just right.” We covered the outer crust edges with aluminum foil so they wouldn’t burn, pushed the newly made pie into the oven, and shut the door. And she was right. The pie we baked from my grandma’s recipe came out just right. It was so perfect that a small piece of me wanted it for myself, but it didn’t feel right to keep something that I made with intention of giving to someone else. This new pie I felt proud to share, whereas giving The Bad Pie away would have haunted me.
Later that night, my sister came over, and we were trying to decide what we should watch together. I didn’t want to watch anything that would make me have sad feelings of any kind; I wanted something fun and light, something that would make me remember that joy existed in the world. “The Great British Bake Off,” my sister suggested. She said it was a wholesome, good feels show and that it would be perfect. I agreed that it sounded like a good choice, especially since I had just been in a baking mood with this apple pie, and so we put the show on while we ate tacos for dinner around my small coffee table. I became invested right away, and it helped to distract me from the immediate pain I wallowed in with joyous displays of tenderly baked wonders. In the weeks that followed, I went through all the seasons and extras, and when I was done with everything, I decided to watch them all again, and then again.
Spending that time baking with my mother from her mother’s recipe book in my tiny studio apartment kitchen when my heart felt like it would never heal was a surprising joy and comfort that I didn’t realize I needed at the time. It reminded me of following her instruction while we baked together from the same recipe book when I was young. Her presence granted me the relief I needed from the anguish I was shrouded in, and baking with her in an act of service for someone else through my grandmother’s recipe helped me inch toward a delicate path of healing, emulating the way my grandmother used to when I was a child.
These handful of years later, my life is very different; I live in a new state with a new life, and I have a dog that I adopted not long after Achilles’ passing named Tallulah, along with her two kitty sisters Finn and Fern, who came two years later. I have a new partner, and a new family found with his children. And along with the other wonderful new things that have found their way into my life and my heart, my compulsion to bake when I have feelings to express or when I want to share something special I’ve made with my own two hands with someone has only grown stronger.
The truth is that I roll my eyes at whatever touching short story is penned above the recipes, and because I am the The Protagonist of Life with debilitating issues revolving around my own vulnerability and skepticism, I assume that everyone else does this as well. We all know that no one reads the paragraphs above the recipe. Whatever is written above the recipe is written for its own single purpose: to be skipped. Which is why instead of composing touching stories detailing how my passion for baking originated, I will simply be detailing the locations of all my former husbands’ bodies and the events culminating to the fortuity in which they found themselves in those locations. (The events were all circumstantial, I can assure you.) And because I can write here in peace without worrying about if what I put here will ever be read, I can say with candid honesty that my apple pie recipe is the first recipe I’ve ever made, with help from my grandmother, that I am proud be able to call my own.
If you have made it this far, please accept my sincere gratitude for not giving up on me after a long-winded entry that circles around my own pain and joy while only lightly intersecting between the two with the exercise of baking. I can’t give you a pie I’ve made with my own two hands, but I will tell you how to make one with yours in my next post, and I hope that will be enough.
In this new baking journey, it feels right to dedicate my first recipe to my mom and my grandma. Coincidences are peculiar things, and as I’ve been sitting here reliving my memories of these two wonderful women who have without a doubt had the most influence in my life, it has only just now occurred to me that my grandma was born with the maiden name of Baker. It’s a coincidence, but it also feels a little bit special to have that part of her also be a part of me as I use her vintage Pyrex bowls to make her recipes.
In my fresh start here with chronicling my baking beginning, the first recipe I’d like to share with you is my grandma’s apple crumble pie, spun with my own touch. You can find it here.
You can learn more about my history with baking here.
Thanks for reading. Hope you stick around.
xo,
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