In celebration of Julia--an odd recipe

 

Today is Julia Child’s birthday. The legendary chef would be 111, probably still drinking wine and dropping chickens on the floor. In celebration of her birthday, the Kitchn website asked fifteen home cooks for their favorite Child’s recipes. Responses included the expected: French dressing, upside down martini, crepes, coq au vin, chicken liver mousse, and, of course, the classic boeuf bourguignon.

By contrast, I thought I’d share one of the most unusual recipes I’ve ever heard of. Let me stress I have not tried this, but I trust Texas author Cindy Bonner who sent me this recipe for Water Pie. You’ve heard of other Depression-era pies with simple, inexpensive ingredients—vinegar pie is a classic. Then there’s Ritz cracker pie, often called mock apple pie, for when apples aren’t available—it is said to taste remarkably like apple pie. Chess pie and buttermilk pie, rich with butter and cream or milk, may not be money-saving Depression pies, but they are classic, southern favorites and have the same custard texture that Cindy found in water pie. My Mississippi daughter-in-law makes chess pie for us at holidays, and it is one of my favorites.

So what is water pie? Sounds … well, watery. This goes together like nothing I’ve ever heard of before, so if you try it, be sure to follow the directions

Water Pie

 

Ingredients:

1 - 9” pie shell, unbaked

1 1/2 cup water

4 TBL all purpose flour

1 cup sugar

2 tsp vanilla

5 TBL butter cut in pieces

 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Pour the water into the prepared 9” unbaked pie shell. In small bowl, combine flour and sugar together. Sprinkle the sugar mixture evenly over the water in the crust. Do not stir. Drizzle the vanilla over the water and top with pieces of butter. Bake pie for 30 minutes. Lower heat to 375 degrees and cover edges of crust if necessary to prevent excessive browning. Bake for 25-30 more minutes. The pie will be watery when you take it out of the oven but will thicken as it cools. Once completely cool, chill in the fridge. 

Cindy served this with a dollop of whipping cream but says her partner, Wayne, didn’t think it needed it. For Cindy, the texture reminded her of chess pie. It was, she said, surprisingly flavorful with a unique texture. She advises a couple of cautions: put the pie plate on a cookie sheet for baking, to catch drips; also the crust stuck to the bottom—I suppose either greasing or flouring the pie pan would help that.

 

If you don’t know Cindy’s work, you might want to investigate. As she says, her heroes are most often women and her soldiers drive supply trucks rather than tanks. Her newest title is For Love and Glory, a WWII saga about a Texas boy who joined the Royal Air Force to fly against the Germans when he didn’t quality for the fledgling US air force. Of course, there’s a strong romantic element. The Passion of Dellie O’Barr and Looking after Lily are classics, and Right from Wrong won a Texas PEN Award. She blogs at http://cindybonner.blogspot.com and more about her can be found at https://www.cindybonner.com.

Let me know if  you try water pie. I’ll pass the word along to C indy.

 

 

I found my dream vacation!

 

Julia Child's French kitchen
Photo by Airbnb

I hope you noticed I’ve been absent, silent, gone for a couple of days. I plead an avalanche that hit my desk plus lots of company. By evening, which is the time I usually write my blog posts, I was too tired. No functioning brain. But now I’m ready to chuck it all and take a vacation I never dreamed was possible. Me, who doesn’t really like to fly and never felt as drawn to France as I do to Scotland.

What changed it? A chance to rent Julia Child’s cottage, La Pitchoune, (the little one) in the south of France. Julia’s kitchen with its famous pegboard is intact and functioning—you can cook dinner if you want. The three-bedroom, three-bath cottage also comes with an outdoor kitchen, a charming patio, a saltwater pool, and lush gardens.

Of course, this Airbnb is a bit expensive: $703 a night is within reason (after all, it sleep six), but if you want an all-day cooking class—shopping, wine pairing, and instructions for preparing one of her legendary, multi-course dinners—add $1500 to the bill. If you’d rather watch than cook, you can hire a personal chef for $500 (not including ingredients and wine). And then there’s airfare to France.

Would you all please buy a lot of books so I can go. Maybe I’d take my daughters. For the nonce, I have something wonderful to dream about.

Meantime back in Fort Worth where my feet are firmly planted on the ground, it has been a busy but happy few days. A load of work landed on my desk, starting with the neighborhood newsletter. I always encourage people to submit before the deadline, and this month they did, with the result that a lot of copy landed on my computer late Sunday night, which was technically before Monday’s deadline. Today I sent a whopping 28-page issue to the printer. Sunday also brought a critique of Irene in Danger from my mentor/friend that sent me off on some rewriting, and now I’m giving it one last proof before putting it into production. Hope to publish early in November. I may be fooling myself, but reading it again this time, I like it better than I ever thought I would.

Being busy makes me happy, but so does visiting with friends, new and old, and I have had some treats along that line. Saturday night Linda, a friend I’ve known for at least thirty-five years, came for supper. For most of those years, we have lived at least thirty miles apart, and when we did live in the same city briefly, early on when we were, ahem, much younger, we weren’t really that close. It’s been a friendship that has strengthened and grown over the years. Now, she’s about to move to Taos, though she assures me she will keep a presence in Texas. I hope so.

Linda has long been a person who appreciates both my mysteries—she says I have a devious mind—and my cooking experiments. I fixed a 1905 Columbia Salad for us. It’s the signature salad, tossed at tableside, of the Columbia restaurant in Tampa that opened in 1905. The dressing is hearty, to say the least—next time I may cut back on the oregano a bit. But the salad is rich with ham, Swiss cheese, head lettuce, Parmesan, and grated Romano—I used pecorino, as I always do. And I left out the pimiento-stuffed Kalamata olives—catering to my own taste (or dislikes). For dessert, I broiled nectarine halves with brown sugar (too much), blueberries, and a pat of butter. As she fought to separate the fruit from its stone, Linda muttered, “My grandmother would say these are not cling free.” We didn’t have halves—we had sort of hash. Linda said she loved it; I thought it too sweet. Another time I’d cut way back on the sugar.

Last night I went from old to new—a relatively new friend came for happy hour and stayed for supper, because I enticed her with a composed salad of canned salmon, pickled cucumbers, hearts of palm, hard-boiled egg, and tomato (darn! I forgot the avocado languishing in the fridge). It’s a salad that my mom and I used to make, and it carried me back to my childhood. My guest enjoyed it. She and I can go in a nanosecond from “So how’s your world” to some really involved discussions, which we both enjoy and which involve lots of laughter. A thoroughly pleasant evening.

Tonight was happy hour with the neighbors, which is always fun, and then Christian grilled us lamb burgers that we had with tzatziki sauce I had in the fridge and a salad dressed with a mixture of the dressings in the fridge, including the 1905 salad one. The meal was heavy with oregano but so good.

And now, dear friends, I’m back to proof reading. But I expect my dreams tonight to be of cooking a gibelotte in Julia’s kitchen.