VERSATILE PIES

Versatile pies

           As someone once unerringly observed: “pies are comfort in a crust”. Their creamy, fruity or savory flavors tempt our taste buds as desert after a meal and the savory pie is meant to constitute the main course itself.

          We in the USA tend to associate pies more with desert, but their origins in the British Isles many centuries ago were in meat pies, prepared to be served at meals or as hand pies to be taken short journeys or hawked by aggressive vendors at street corners. Pies were apparently invented/created in many places, often using local prevalent types of pastry. Thus, we have Quiche from France, Spanish empanadas with a dough crust, Greek Spanakopita with phyllo dough, turnovers with puff pastry and Shepherd’s pie with a top layer of mashed potatoes, instead of pastry. Shepherd’s pie is claimed by both Scots and the Irish, though some of the earliest records of it go back to Ireland in the seventeen hundreds, when housewives economized on everything, and potatoes were reasonably available.

          Pies and tarts are often confused, since they are both round and use a similar crust, but by definition a tart is open and has only a bottom crust. Which of course is confusing when you think of an open-faced pie! 

                                       Goat cheese-leek and tomato tart/pie

          Trim, split and clean 2 leeks and cut the white and light green parts in ½ inch slices. Prepare and set aside 8 oz crumbled goat cheese, ½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, ½ cup chopped parsley and 1/3 cup pitted and sliced Kalamata olives.

          Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Line a 9-inch pie plate with pie pastry and bake for 5 minutes. Sauté leeks in 1 tblsp. butter on medium heat in a pan for 10 minutes, stir in 1 chopped garlic clove and after an additional minute, set aside. In a small bowl beat 2 eggs with ¼ tsp. pepper, 1 tsp. oregano and mix with the crumbled goat cheese and parsley.

          Layer leeks in the baked pastry shell, sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and spread over evenly the goat cheese mix. Dot with Kalamata olives and cover with thinly sliced Roma tomatoes. Sprinkle everything with slivered Parmesan cheese.

          Bake 15 minutes at 450 degrees, reduce temperature to 350 degrees and bake for an additional 30 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature with scattered parsley leaves for garnish.

          Grocery deli-case pre-made pie crust is packaged separately for each crust, so after baking my one crust goat cheese pie it seemed perfect to use the other crust for a desert pie. At our house blueberry pie is the unsurpassed favorite and thus I make sure to freeze part of a flat of Maine wild blueberries each August. The following Blueberry crumble pie evolved to fit the occasion with a most intense and pleasing flavor.

                                          Blueberry walnut-crumble pie

          Crumble: mix ¾ cup flour with 1/3 cup sugar and ½ tsp. nutmeg. Cut in 1/3 cup firm butter with a pastry cutter or 2 knives until crumbly. Stir in 1/3 cup chopped walnuts.

          Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Line a 10-inch pie plate with crust, lightly crimp the edges and bake for 5 minutes.  Sprinkle 1 tblsp. fine breadcrumbs over the crust. In a small bowl mix ¾ cups sugar with 3 tblsp. cornstarch and spread 1/3 of the mixture over the breadcrumbs. Toss the rest of the sugar-cornstarch mix with 3 ½ cups frozen wild blueberries and turn into the pie crust. Sprinkle with 2-3 tblsp. lemon juice and the grated zest of a lemon.

          Cover all with the crumble mix, spreading to cover the entire surface. Bake 15 minutes at 450 degrees. Reduce temperature to 350 degrees and bake 30-35 minutes longer, until juice bubbles up along the crumble. It may be prudent to put a sheet of aluminum foil on the shelf below for the second part of baking, since without a top crust the filling may attempt to boil over.  Serve Warm or at room temperature.

          And then of course there is ‘pizza’, which in Italian means tomato pie.  In early 1900 it became street food in New York City and was often simply called pie, disregarding all distinctions between a pie and a tart.

    (I. Winicov Harrington lives in coastal Maine and is the author of “How to Eat Healthy and Well..."and " Uncharted Journey from Riga”; website: www.winicov-harrington.com)