One has to be reminded that this is a pie. not a western hemisphere, not an entire dinner from codfish chowder to hickory and hazel nuts. For it is hard to tell the difference. This dish is a continent that takes long in cooking. And it does contain all the essentials a man will ever need, on the crosscut saw, in the haymow, on the beds of love.
This banquet, which I must remind you is a pie, went into the oven, and it baked there all the forenoon long. It needed to. Like the burly Hercules it took a lot of making, hours on hours of it. For this pic was a whole dinner in one dish.
When the pie came out, brown as acorns on top, and large enough to fill the middle of the table, the family gathered round, with water at the mouth and tremblings at the knee. There might be a few other dishes—a beef stew, a dish of tripe, a saddle of mutton. But these few dishes were just side shows to this P. T. Barnum of the pie family. All the diners saved up their strength for it.
When you bite into a deep six-decker slab of this peculiar pie. you don't bite into mere pastry. You bite into a carnival of Venice, a three-ring circus, a section of the music of the sphere. Cow, pig, apple tree, sugar cane have met and mingled. You cannot tell sleek sweetened pork from porkified sleek apple. You cannot tell your stomach from Eden, syrup from soup, salt from sugar, the wicked world from peace.
We had one hired man on Lost Paradise Farm who went to meet his Maker after eating the better part of one of these deep pork-apple pies, which mother forgot to hide in the cellar way. But he went the better way to a better world.
The more I think of it the more I think this particular pie of apples and pork is the very symbol and seal of Christmas. None of my joys of a boy at Christmas, not even the striped popguns, a new drum smelling like peppermint in its red varnish, not even the corn balls rolled in molasses I adhered to through all the red-green day, pleased me as much as did this pie that the whole family of us curled up around on that holy night. It was like carols and shepherds listening to angels. It was angels themselves, wings and carols and all.
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