The pie came with our ancestors from Europe. But it has learned a lot from the Indians and the climate from being so long over here. It has learned to cover its face, for one tiling, and not to go into a hostile world like the innocent that is its British Cousin. It has learned to take whole new continents into its hot cosmos—berries stouter and sharper and wilder than anything mild Europe can show, vegetables that were never dreamed of as pie fillers over there. It has taken the fragrant spruce woods and the deer that stalk the woods into its full belly, and it has learned to grow into a stout man's chief anchor to windward. as my Uncle Frank would say, in a time of squalls. None of my big uncles would have grown the demigods they were. had it not been for huckleberries and crab apples, deer meat and moose meat, which went heavily into them in the slabs of this American dessert that can be a whole dinner. Give a fisherman ten apple pies, and he is all set for a day.
New England without her pie for breakfast to grow on might have grown up pindling or might have perished long ago in her zero weather. No pie, no Minute Man. No pie, no pants of my uncles' magnitude, no handle-bar mustaches. No pie, no Beechers improving the World. No pit. no Bunker Hill. It is all as axiomatic as that The American pie is the first draft of our Declaration of Independence from Europe. A smart wife, if she has a New England hillside behind her kitchen, can bring up a family of the most robust of democrats—I mean in the largest sense—on her pies alone.
Imagine a Christmas without mincemeat pie, squash pie, punkin pie, or blueberry. No, don't try. For it would be like trying to imagine an Eskimo without his igloo full of herring smoke and warmth to retreat into, or a boy without a jackknife in his dungarees.
Of course, nobody has much room for pie after the Christmas geese or turkeys are stowed in the hold, at least for more than two average slivers of the punkin and say two man-sized slabs of the mince. But there are other days than Christmas. The pits are there all over the kitchen, scenting up the place, adding brilliant browns and yellows and reds to the Christmas colors. There are knives and empty boys and yearning unties. The pits will be a steady diet and keep life plump and saucy for weeks after the turkey is a long-forgotten skeleton and a derelict.
Punkin pie is about as golden a gift for Christmas as a lusty man could ask. In late October the boys of the farm have rolled home these suns of vegetables that grow on vines and light up the dying year. The boys' breeches bulged so with their straining at the vast Fluted pumpkins that it took a smart man to tell where the boys left off and the grooved vegetables began. Now such ones of the pumpkins as did not turn into grinning heads, all fiery eyes and teeth and mouths breathing fire, at Hallowe'en are piled ceiling-high in the cellar and are lighting up the cobwebs with their deep golden light.
The farm mother, with sugar and molasses, turns twenty of the pumpkins into a whole Fort Knox of gold pics. They age for weeks on the side shelves along the cellar staircase with crinkles of crust minting them around Uncles and little boys burrow into them by stealth, but punkin pics enough remain to bear up the whole hilarity of Christmas and keep the family going strong and singing deep into the new year.
Blackberries, blueberries, huckleberries, currants still bring back lost summer in hot pies, and the smell of them goes out over the empty earth. For the farmer's wife has laid all these berries down in her preserve jars or jugs, and she has only to pour lost summer out into her hollow pie shells and pop them into her oven.
But it is mince that means Christmas most. A Christmas with no mince pie would be like a small apple cheeked boy, in red mittens, a white stocking-leg cap. and voluminous red pants with no sled to go belly-bunt on down to the very sea or into the alder swamp among the surprised rabbits. Mincemeat is as much a part of New England as Calvin's theology and baked beans. It is indigenous as the brick that warms a man's cold winter feet in bed and makes him meditate on love. It is native as the old Waterbury watch.
Apples are mincemeat's beginnings. But they are the small, hard, crabbed apples, full of the trace minerals of cobalt and manganese which grow among the heaps of stones that are New England's glacial hills. You gather them on the last golden day of October. around the cellar hole of an abandoned house, from trees that have run wild as the Indians the past hundred years. Some of the trees are natives, and the Indians used to gather their apples and hang them on strings to parch and dry. You find these wild apples by going where the deer go. where the partridge come for supper and a night's roost. These fruits are as sharp as cranberries when you bite into them, and they bite you back. Only a small boy, who could digest even shingle nails, could ear them in their wild state. Or a hunting uncle. who could car ten-penny nails or get sustenance from a grindstone after stalking a buck from sunup to sundown.
Such apples are cured as one would cure hams. They are peeled and halved and dried on newspapers in the kitchen's heat till they look like flakes of Egyptian mummies. They chew like leather. and taste about the same. They are strung on twine like brown beads, and strings of them are festooned all over the open chamber. There in the faint November sunlight from the skylight and in the heat that seeps up through the floor from the kitchen below, along with men's bass voices making low about man-affairs at night, the apples have mellowed.
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