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.
The mother of the house soaks these apples overnight, late in November, over against Thanksgiving time. The dried apples plump out again, their wrinkles and their hateful bitterness go out of them. Mother sets a stout boy to chopping them in her wooden chopping tray scored deep by bygone robust boys. This for the Indian part of the mincemeat. The boy manufactures up about a half bushel of the wild fruit.
Mother herself chops up the lean meat of the deer that father shot in the wild apple orchard—tartened by these same apples on strings—eight pounds of it. in another tray. She salts the meat well as it slowly seethes tender. She sets the boy's chopped apples on to boil for an hour on a mild stove, and in a thick iron kettle so as not to burn them. After the apples have turned into a deep brown continent, mother dowses in the cider. A cupful of it, hard, to a quart of apples. This is father's own brew, what he calls molten manhood. It comes from the same wild apples as in the kettle here.
Now this mother drains her deer meat and brings meat and apples together in a stupendous kettle of pioneer days. She puts in three pounds of raisins, all the dried currants from two currant bushes. orange peel from a month's breakfasts, and all the citron and the lemon peels she can put her hands on. She turns in four pounds of suet chopped up into a snowy froth. She stirs in half a gallon of black molasses, the kind the old West Injun slaves used to hide their master's bull-tail whip in. the kind my Uncle Frank used to say would put whiskers on your feet. (Only Uncle Frank didn't mean feet but a stronger set of things: his was New England euphemism or New England bowdlerization.)
Then with the savory mess seething like Vesuvius on the stove, mother pours back all the water the deer meat has stewed in. She stirs up her erupting volcano hard. When the mess is hot as hades and is making the house smell like paradise for four miles down-wind, mother and the boy pour the molten makings of Thanksgiving and Christmas into wooden buckets, and even into the wash tub. cover it well, to cure, and put the buckets down-cellar. The aroma of the mincemeat comes right out through the wooden staves, right up through the double pine floorboards. And the kitchen swims deep in Christmas from this day on.
When the lady of the farmhouse puts this concoction, which is massed Indians and West Indies and deer and fruit and forest, into her pie shells, she slashes the pies with the mystic iconography of old New England. It is a long barb of an Indian arrow with feathers slashed in the dough. She says such holes are for the pic to breathe through in the oven. But you must nor believe her. There is more here than a ladylike woman can tell. These chevroned lines are lines of life, and they mean man. This is strong medicine from the Indians. It also has something to do with the long arrows of wild geese going south ahead of winter, coming back north ahead of spring, with their deep bass honking about eternal life. The lady of the farm speaks in euphemisms. too.
A Christmas browned around with mince pies built of Indian apples and deer meat is a Christmas that makes the meanest mouth water and fills the hearts of even the crabbedest hired men full of peace and good will.
This goes also for deep pork-apple pie.
Other regions south or west of New England have copied our mincemeat, made it out of tame beef and tame apples, and have had quite a good Christmas for themselves. But no place I know of has ever stolen our pork-apple pie from us. It is too heavy to steal, wiseacres may say. It is more than that. It is one of our secrets, one of our powerful medicines, and I am taking my wellbeing in my hands when I talk about it. It is a lodge ritual, and one of our hidden strengths. Not many farms have pork apple pie now. But those that stiII do prosper, and the children on them run mostly to boys. And these boys are good at the bucksaw, at school, at college, at building the nation, at keeping the country fit and handsome and human.
This secret strength of ours is housed in a deep skillet, or a fry-kettle. It has to be. For it is layers on layers of surprise, delight, and robust good fillings of boys and men. The dish comes down from our pioneer ancestors. It has Miles Standish and Paul Bunyan burned into its pork chunks and welded into its proud slices of apples.
The creator of this pie for the ages and cold blue northern winters and mornings like diamonds lays down thick foundations of dough for it. She or he—for my portly Uncle Frank was the best pork-apple pie maker I ever knew and ran it up without ever dusting his vast Sunday pants, which he always wore when at this ecstasy in flour—makes a crust (hat could hold up a small boy. She makes it out of a quart of flour and a piece of lard big as a goose egg worked into the Hour by the hands. Water is put in, but only enough to nuke the dough malleable. It is rolled out flat on the breadboard. Then it is put into the deep iron dish as an upholstery.
Next, sliced raw apples arc laid in, a good layer of them, snowed over with a light dust of brown sugar. Then comes the chief secret, the holy of holies. The medicine man who was my Uncle Frank next took a piece of raw salt pork, the size of his paired big sea-captain thumbs—which may be euphemism again—four inches by three, Me cut it into chunks the size of his upper thumbs. Like all sea captains, Uncle Frank measured everything to his own body. (That's the way. come to think of it, our fathoms and feet started.) Uncle Frank put these chunks in a layer in his pie. Then he layered this layer of his dish over with another layer of sliced apples, dusted brown with more dark sugar. Then another deep secret: He poured in a pint of the thickest soured cream. The kind of cream that existed before cream separators made mince of our manhood. This Uncle Frank did when my aunt wasn't looking. It was something not for women to see, like the instrument that docs the bull-roaring in Sourh-SeaIsland male-temples. Last of all, he sprinkled the yellow velvet of the cream with deep brown cinnamon, rolled out a roof for the whole business, slashed it with the he-symbols of taur flying geese, buttered over the dough, and sloshed on a cupful of cold spring water. The cold water was Uncle Frank's bit of ritual he worked out from the fertility of his own mind, 10 make sure the baked crust would fall apart into flakes of beatitude. Then my Uncle Frank bounced his whole Tower of Babel into the oven. The grate was out, the pie filled the whole cavern of iron.
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.