Zen and the Art of Pie Making

Zen and the Art of the Pie-making

My most treasured memories growing up are with my Gramma May, world’s best pie maker.

While preparing her famous desserts, my wide eyes would capture the moment her fingers transformed into a flour-soaked sieve. As her wrists shifted perfectly in sync with the tapping of her wedding ring against the rotating porcelain mixing bowl, my wonder for pie-making grew. I became entranced with the way her fingers pinched the pastry with ease as the pie tin rotated like ticking clockwork. I bore witness to the meticulous cutting of each lattice strip, as equal in length and girth as the one that came before it.

I stared in admiration of her effortless precision, developed over the last fifty years of repeating the same motions again and again. Her trained eyes and hands anticipating the next ingredient. She could literally feel when to sprinkle the ice water over the dough. She intuitively knew when the pastry was rolled out one eighth of an inch. It was a dance, an artistic rendition of culinary domestication. While watching Gramma May, the mundane became profoundly spiritual.

It is a memory so clear I can close my eyes and be back in her kitchen, scanning the details of the room, the smell of the dough, and the feeling of pure joy in my tiny heart.

I can see the rolling pin gliding over the counter. I can remember the crunch of the scissor blades as they slowly made their way through the pre-cooked crust, creating perfect strips for decorating.

I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, it was the art of her craft, pie-making, that inspired my creative endeavors. She wasn’t an artist in the conventional sense. She didn’t paint or draw or sculpt stone. She was a simple woman who took pride in her work. She crafted each pie as if fit for a king.

Crafting, whether with food, art store purchases, nature or even music, is a human expression of the spiritual world within each soul. It is creating something from seemingly nothing.

The way my Gramma May turned flour, sugar, butter and fruit into the most delectable masterpieces is beyond comprehension. I couldn’t replicate it even though I make a humble attempt every Thanksgiving.

Creating the art, not the art itself, is the most rewarding part of the journey. Once the pie is eaten and the clean plates are restored to the cupboard, it's over. What’s left is the process of the creation, the memory of the countless moments of transformation that happen in between the idea (the pie) and the memory of the idea (how it felt/tasted/smelled/looked). This is when the art of any craft becomes the spirit or the inspiration of the artist herself.

Art is spirit incarnated.

Gramma May loved to make pies just as I love to craft. It doesn’t matter what medium is used. Whether I am knitting blankets, felting puppets, folding paper lanterns, or painting landscapes, I have traced and snipped, taped and glued, folded and measured with only a handful of tools.

Of course precision is everything when it comes to consistency. The one tool that I have more of in my house than any other one thing is a pair of extraordinary scissors. I must have one pair of scissors every ten feet of my home. Fiskars makes the best and trust me, I have tried them all. In fact, it is with Fiskars shears that Gramma May trimmed her perfect pies. I even have a pair for cutting bacon!

Once again, my mind begins to float back to that kitchen in Gramma May’s little red house. Her nimble hands, wrinkled and spotted with age, held the artistic potential to change the world. She changed my world and taught me the value of the art of Pie-Making, the love and wisdom that births every craft, and the devotion to every step of the process.