This recipe arrived in the mail today from my mother:
Rhubarb Pie| 1½ c rhubarb | 1 egg |
| 7/8 ' sugar | 2 tbls. flour |
Cut stalks of rhubarb in ½" pieces before measuring. Mix sugar, flour & egg: add to rhubarb and bake between crusts or 1 crust with lattice strips.
Also, can be sprinkled with ½c raisins.
40-45 mins @ 350° - 375°
Why am I telling you this? Because I’ve kept silence long enough; now the story must be told.
The year was 1988. It was July. For those of you who aren’t good at either trivia or math, I was 15 years old. My teeth had just been released of their metallic braces. I can still remember feeling like my teeth were missing because they were ½ the thickness they had been for those many, many long months of orthodontorture.
We, my mother, stepfather, and I, traveled by car to my uncle’s house in Maine. The drive took roughly 4,872 hours. From Massachusetts. I don’t know why it took so long, but my memory on that point is clear.
It had become our summertime tradition to go and visit my Uncle Clem and Aunt Ruth. I’m not sure what they had done to deserve this perennial visit. I can only imagine that in their former lives they had drowned baby kittens for fun, and this was their punishment. More likely, it was a place where we could go on vacation relatively inexpensively.
Even with the lengthy travel time, I always enjoyed visiting their house. It was the biggest house on the biggest piece of property I’d ever seen. They had “17 acres” which to me meant something like “half the distance to the moon”. They also had dogs who loved to run and play catch.
Every year we had a croquet tournament which was one of the highlights of my year. It honestly didn’t matter to me if I won, although I’m sure those in attendance at the time might remember it differently. I loved setting up the course on their front yard, pushing the wires into the ground, banging the stakes in at either end, everything carefully measured by mallet-heads and paces. When asked to set up the course, I attempted to measure with such precision that Swiss watch-makers would have told me to chill out.
I’d love to tell you some heart-felt, insightful reason why I loved it so much, but I really have no idea. I do know that we eventually bought a set for our house, and never really used it. Like everything else that’s magical in the moment, you just can’t recreate it at will. But for an hour or so, we were all out together enjoying ourselves in what would have passed for a Norman Rockwell knock-off paining.
Aunt Ruth and Uncle Clem were both wonderful to me as well. Like everyone else, I’m sure they had their faults and failings, but they always seemed to happy to have us come and visit, were always gracious and kind, and made me feel right at home. They even talked about having me come to stay for the entire summer one year. I gave it some serious thought, and although I finally decided against it, I can’t express how nice it was to know that there was someone who would have had me stay with them for that length of time. Those of you who remember what it’s like to be a teen-ager can probably relate.
There were occasional dramatic moments during our visits. My sister passed out once while we were there, and very nearly hit her head on corner of the fireplace. One year we went to the Alpine Slides. If you aren’t familiar with them, is when you sit on a small piece of plastic and slide down a concrete shoot and Warp Factor 13 and hope that you don’t fly off on one of the corners or hit the bottom with enough force to catapult you into Vermont. We had gone several times, but the last time that we went, I had trouble keeping my arms in and ended up getting a skin-versus-concrete abrasion burn over a significant portion of my arm. My arm reached out just a little too far on a corner and touched up against the side. It was some of the most intense pain I’d ever felt, and the wound weeped for days. Not to be outdone, I whined for days (it hurt!).
I think it was either the year before or the year after that they took us out to the beach. It was h.o.t as h.e.l.l. that year. I’ve never been big on the beach or swimming in the ocean, but I can remember running as fast as I could to get in the water. I can remember running towards the edge of this little overhang a few feet above the water. I remember jumping off and sailing through the air. I remember looking down and seeing a lot of large, jagged rocks just below the surface of the water.
Remember that saying about looking before you leap? Yeah, you should definitely do that. I still have the scars on my knee. I’m probably fortunate that I didn’t kill myself. There were a lot of rocks.
So another set of giant band-aids for that trip.
Ah memories. There are so many. Uncle Clem used to smoke a pipe. I hated cigarette smoke, but a pipe, at least his pipe, was always a wonderful smell. They had this wall in the barn where they kept all these pictures and notes and drawings. It was a highlight to go in there and find something that I had done posted on that wall.
But of all the things I remember, one of the things I’ll remember the longest is Aunt Ruth’s Apple Pie.
Aunt Ruth loved to cook. I never remember a meal there that didn’t take an hour. She cooked enough for twice as many people, and it was sooooo good. I can still taste the corn on the cob after years of having to cut the corn off because I couldn’t eat it with braces on.
Like most wonderful Aunts, she made pies. Now you’re either someone who likes pie or doesn’t like pie, but if you like pie let me tell you that these were delicious. I’d almost agree to be executed if I could have an Aunt Ruth Apple Pie as part of my last meal. (The nice thing about having Aunt Ruth make your last meal before you’re executed would be that the state would have to give you an extra day just to finish eating.)
Dining at Aunt Ruth and Uncle Clem’s house was, however, a formal occasion. We might be dressed in summer clothes, but manners were to be minded. I don’t ever remember being told this, but I can remember feeling that it was quite important to be on my best behavior at the table. You didn’t just get up (unless it was to help bring something in), you asked to be excused from the table. Except that you probably didn’t even ask to be excused, you just waited until everyone else finished eating.
They had a grand old dining room table in a lovely old dining room. It was dimly lit, subdued, a place to come and settle in for a meal before the evening and off to bed.
I’m not sure if they realize it or not, but many adults have this tendency to want to talk after dinner and before dessert. They would probably say it’s healthier to wait, let dinner digest, not to mention more polite, a chance to sit and talk. Kids find this annoying. At least I know I did, and I feel fairly confident in speaking for adolescents everywhere when I say, “Hurry up with the pie and ice cream already!”
Of course I never would have said this aloud, certainly not to my parents, and absolutely-are-you-kidding-me not to my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Clem. I’m sure I sat there seemingly very polite as I nodded and listened and spoke when spoken to, but I would have knocked them all down a flight of stairs to get to the pie.
Finally Uncle Clem would say, “Well Ruth, what did you make for us?” which was his way of saying, “Enough gabbing, woman, bring me pie!” except that he never would have said such a thing and probably couldn’t even think it. Aunt Ruth would get up and head into the kitchen. This was my cue to help clear dishes. This was a win-win situation, because either I’d be told “No, no, don’t bother with those” which meant that I didn’t have to help but still got credit for offering, or I’d take some dishes into the kitchen, and while all the adults were thinking to themselves what a pleasant and polite young man I was, I was totally scoping out the desserts. Brownies? Cookies? Cake? Very likely there could be more than one, but you need to choose carefully, because you couldn’t just take 2, you had to be polite, take one, and then sit there and hope that someone offered you seconds or a second chance to select something else.
This day, however, I knew I would not be looking for anything else. Aunt Ruth walked in with an Apple Pie. In my head I quickly counted the number of people at the table. I could have turned and counted them in person, but that would have meant taking my eyes off the pie. I deduced that if the pieces were cut just so, there would be enough for me to have two. Now here’s the quandary of teenage pie-lust: do I hope to get a big piece of pie and be happy with that, or do I hope to get a smaller sized piece but be offered seconds? Such a quandry would have baffled even Solomon.
All I knew is that there was pie headed my way. Others may also have been served, I wasn’t really paying attention. Fortunately no one was expecting me to answer any questions about my schooling, or what I wanted to be when I grew up, or where I planned to go to college, because I probably would have simply grunted “pie” in response.
Aunt Ruth cut a generous piece, enough so that one might have been satisfied even if one was not offered a second piece (that is, if one wasn’t a gluttonous pie pig). I sank my fork into its tender golden crust goodness and brought it to my mouth....
And suddenly realized that something was very, very wrong.
It was not unlike when I was steaming down the Alpine Slide and realized I was not going to be able to hold on. It was quite similar to the feeling of having jumped off the bank, onto to see rocks just beneath the water.
Except this time it was in my mouth. My mouth. My previously-anticipating-the-most-exciting-thing-ever-to-cross-my-15-year-old-lips-and-that-includes-the-tongue-of-a-certain-girl-I-fancied mouth.
The apples were rotten.
My eyes started to water. My throat began to close.
Now you will remember that this was as close to formal dining as I had ever experienced, with people who treated me as nicely as I could imagine, who welcomed me into their homes. There was just absolutely no way that I was going to throw up at the table.
I hoped.
Nor was I going to make a scene which would not only embarrass my mother and my aunt, but also cause me to be subjected to a lecture for the 4,872 hour trip home.
I grabbed for my glass and drowned the vile deceitful apple pie in milk (a trick nearly every child learns early on in life).
What was I to do? Apparently no one else had tasted their pie yet. To say anything would mean to criticize my Aunt’s cooking. To not say anything meant that they would all suffer the same gustatory angst I had endured. Being a teen-ager and naturally prone to self-protection, I decided not to draw attention.
I waited patiently for someone else to try theirs. The adults were getting coffee and waiting for everyone to be served (another habit teens find annoying).
Finally someone, I don’t remember who, took their first bite. I remember bracing myself like someone who knows which door leads to the man-eating tiger as the contestant walks blithely up to it and opens it to their immediate and painful death. Which is to say that I was half-wincing and half-thinking it was going to be cool to watch the look on their face.
Nothing.
“How could you not notice how nasty that is?!” I yelled, or would have if someone had been in the driveway with a get-away car and paperwork for the witness relocation program. Another bite followed the first, someone else tried theirs, and no response at all! They continued to chat. No one drenched anything in milk or coffee.
“Ruth, this is delicious,” someone said, as if to mock me.
I sat there with my fork in hand, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that I hadn’t eaten a second bite. I was trying to figure out how I had been the only one unfortunate enough to get a piece of pie with rotten apples.
“Thank you,” Ruth replied, “I used rhubarb in my own garden.”
“It’s wonderful,” someone added.
“What the *(&!%#@@! are you doing putting rhubarb in my apple pie!” I yelled, or would have if I had been recently diagnosed with a terminal disease and had less than 20 minutes to live.
As difficult as some may find this to believe, to my knowledge I had never in my life even heard of rhubarb. I didn’t know what it was or what it was supposed to taste like, although I can tell you for a sure and certain fact that rhubarb pie tastes nothing like apple pie. I’ve accidentally eaten Key Lime Pie thinking it was cheesecake, and that’s nasty, but it’s nothing compared to being trapped at a dining room table with a plate full of Not Nearly Apple Pie and knowing that I just had to eat it.
Now I know that there are children today who insist that parents cut the crust off their bread. I know there are parents who indulge their children in this behavior. My own dear mother put up with no shortage of finickiness from me. But by the age of fifteen I had realized that there were some things which were just not tolerated, and one of them was rudeness at another person’s dining room table. You ate what you were given, and you ate it all, lest ye incur the wrath of Disappointed Mother. Just so we’re clear, the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah had their choice between fire & brimstone and Disappointed Mother. They chose the fire and brimstone, naturally.
So I summoned up all the strength I had; and by strength I mean a mixture of fear, courage, and no small amount of intestinal fortitude. I eyed my milk glass, carefully diving the remainder of the pie by the remainder of the milk, to make sure I wouldn’t leave my taste buds stranded without any dairy salvation. I brought a second fork-full to my mouth, pretended to chew it, and drowned it in milk. Fortunately the room was, by this point, sufficiently dim, and the adults were sufficiently engaged with one another, that they did not notice. I determined to get through this as quickly as possible, like ripping off a band-aid. Get through it and move on.
Another bite, another pretend chew, and another gulp of milk.
A big gulp.
Too big, in fact.
I set my glass down to the horrific realization that I had overindulged. There was at least ½ a piece of pie left and less than ¼ of a glass of milk. Even adjusting for the crust (which I presumed tasted fine if someone could ignore the rhubarb), there was no way I was going to make it.
Now others have commented that we sometimes forget the details of the most important moments in our lives, because they are so overwhelmed with emotion. Weddings, funerals, etc are usually remembered more as a blur than with distinction. And so when I say to you that I can’t remember who asked for something from the kitchen, you will have to forgive my failing memory. All I remember is springing from my seat and offering to go get it for them, no doubt further sealed in their minds the notion that I was a pleasant and polite child and hadn’t my parents done a good job raising me.
“Aunt Ruth, would it be alright if I got some more milk?” I asked. I was sufficiently wise in the way of adult rules of etiquette to realize that the position of going into the kitchen to get something for someone else meant that I had enough brownie points to be indulged in also getting myself some more milk.
“Of course! Help yourself,” she replied, bringing my salvation with her words.
Now a foolish person would have brought the milk to the table. I, despite not being able to tell apple from rhubarb in a dimly lit room, was not entirely without savvy. I brought my glass to the refrigerator, filled it up, drank about ½ the glass, and filled it up again, thus allowing some relief to my throat muscles which were protesting every painfully distasteful swallow.
I returned to the table emboldened and assured of victory over the pie. While the adults remained engaged and unaware of my plight, I bit, fake chewed, and drowned the remaining pie without incident. Of course the adults were not yet finished, so I remained at the table, thinking myself quite smart for having avoided, however narrowly, dumping the contents of my stomach at the table.
Until Aunt Ruth cut me another piece of pie and put it on my plate.
I kid you not. And by “kid” I mean another word that I won’t write in polite company. I thought I was going to die.
“Well, that went down fast!” she said and she delivered the second piece of Crusty Purgatory to my plate, “You must have really liked it.”
“Yes, it’s really good,” I told her. Self-preservation at your Aunt and Uncle’s dinner table is so totally an exclusion to the rule about not lying. What was I doing to say? “Actually I nearly puked but fortunately the milk washed it down! What happened to the apple pie you made last year that I raved about for 20 minutes?!?!?”
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, my mother chimed in.
“Gosh, Ruth, you’ll have to give me that recipe. Tim’s usually such a fussy eater, I had no idea he liked rhubarb pie.”
Visions of regular rhubarb pie visits danced in my head. I could see it now: next birthday, instead of the wondrous triple chocolate cake which had been my traditional birthday cake for several years, a huge rhubarb pie with candles. Had I believed the spoon to have been sharp enough, I would have committed seppuku right there at the table.
“That’d be great,” I added. See above notation about exclusions to the lying rule.
My throat now numbed and sufficiently coated, the second piece went down fairly easily. I learned two lessons, and ate much more slowly with small sips from my glass.
The adults continued to talk, oblivious to the near death experience across the table.
That night, upstairs before bed, Mom told me that Ruth had given her the recipe. I knew I had to come clean.
“Mom,” I said, speaking softly but intently, “I nearly died eating that. I thought it was apple.”
I’m not sure if she was bewildered or trying to stifle her amusement.
“But you asked for a second piece!” she said.
“No I didn’t! Aunt Ruth saw how quickly I ate the first one and she just gave me another one! I was just trying to get it over with.”
“You really didn’t like it?”
“NO! I just didn’t want to make a scene.”
She paused.
“I’m very proud of you for finishing both pieces.”
See, I was totally right about the lying exemption.
(Coda: Mom was recently cleaning out some papers and came across the recipe, which is why she sent it to me. Aunt Ruth, if you’ve got web access in heaven, I’m sorry I didn’t like your pie. I tried, but man, the apple was really yummy.)
(followup: see also The Wizard of Id on rhubarb pie.)
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This weekend was the triumphant stage debut of ... well, let's not kid ourselves... This weekend Tim and Tracey were on stage together as part of the police chorus in "Pirates of Penzance" at