I miss my pie tribe, the people I've developed long-standing holiday traditions with. A family member, an ex, a close friend ... we've grown apart. Moved away. Created new lives. New people and traditions have blended with the old, but there is never enough flour, sugar, butter, berries or pumpkin to fill the voids.
Watching bright red cranberries swell, pop and whistle against the warm hue of diced apricots as they soften amid simple syrup in the black heat of a well-worn cast iron pan keeps me firmly rooted in the moment. And yet, somehow, it simultaneously transports me through time, to every time I've made this cranberry lattice pie, to the conversations and people who were there. It's now my daughter Shawna's go-to dessert, the first pie she learned to make, now proudly counted among her specialty recipes.
More than a decade ago, one of the men in our core group of Alaska friends started calling us "The Pie Ladies" -- funny because he was the go-to pumpkin pie guy, but somehow it was the women who got branded as the pie makers. Before children, before thousands of miles and broken relationships separated us, holiday meals were our oasis from the day-to-day, nourishment that brought us closer together and fortified us through good times and bad.
More prized than the holiday meal itself, I adore and long for the process leading up to it. The menu planning. Making grocery lists. Going shopping, with the time to do it slowly and methodically. Organizing the menu for what preparation could or needed to be done a day or two in advance. Then, beckoning our guests to the "mother ship," the designated house transformed into a headquarters for cooking, dining and days' worth of good company.
My mother is an accomplished weekend gourmet, able to immerse herself in the pure joy of cooking. As young children, we didn't comprehend what we were missing when we refused to eat what she'd labored over, usually for a party or special occasion. Mom spent entire days banging away in the kitchen and timing things just right, until, at the appointed hour, everyone would take their seat, look upon her feast of feasts, and eat.
Except for one very unusual Thanksgiving. We knew something was amiss when we were seated in the breakfast nook instead of at our large dining room table. A traditional turkey and its side dishes were nowhere to be found. Mom pulled a brick-shaped turkey loaf, the kind that's sold frozen and wrapped in a tin foil pan, out of the oven and plopped it onto a serving platter. "What is that?" I remember asking with disgust and disappointment. My childish self thought: "This must be revenge. Mom is really angry with us. She doesn't love us anymore." Oh, how silly our child brains are. Mom loved us then as she does now. And that darn turkey loaf was surprisingly good.
Mom theorizes she broke tradition because of the realities imposed by a hectic life. She was a single working woman putting herself through graduate school with joint custody of three willful kids at a time when everyone was still reeling from a hostile divorce years earlier.
Beyond the holidays, I vividly remember Mom teaching me how to make jelly during the summer. I'd use the stool to reach the stove and watch the berries reduce to a sweet, heated syrup, which I couldn't wait to get a taste of on a big wooden spoon. No doubt this is part of why I love making cranberry pie.
These days, my friends and I think a lot about how the passage of time and growing geographical divides change family roles and holiday celebrations.
"Mom and Dad used to make all things holiday look easy while my sister and I just showed up in time to gobble up the feast and made excuses to leave without helping with clean-up. Now Mom expresses horror at the thought of the whirlwind of shopping, cooking and cleaning that goes along with a gala event such as Thanksgiving," explains my wise friend and decadelong Alaska cooking conspirator, Idonna Pieper-Nelson.
"It's a good thing we had years of living states apart from the parents and have made it past the trials of trying to cook frozen turkeys and dropping pies, learning with dear friends over many happy celebrations, to do what mom had made seem simple," she wrote to me in an email from her new home in Washington state. "Coming home to family is great but it would be sublime if we could also bring the friends we've grown to cherish."
Those long, gourmet-inspired meals I cherish have been lost to distance and busier lives. There is less time to plan, prep and coordinate. I miss the traditions of the early years, of my many friends, my family and the time to cook elaborately. Flipping through old recipe cards and meal plans heals the ache. The torn ears on the recipe files, the handwritten shopping and prep schedules scribbled on each -- these nostalgic, tangible links bring me back to each meal. To the closeness we felt. To the closeness that remains even in absence.
This year, within my super-busy household, turkey loaf doesn't sound so bad. And we'll throw in a few pies for good measure. With love we will mix, knead and pat dough and crust, letting the youngest children get floured and messy as they participate and learn. When the baking is done, we'll enjoy a coveted taste of sweetness and warmth that brings everyone we treasure back to us bite by bite by bite.