Of the six nieces of my childless late aunt, I was the only one that she would give her famed and cherished pie crust recipe to. Her pies were the grand finale of all our shared family holiday dinners, and the last pieces of each pie were playfully but determinedly fought over. Many requests for the recipe were made, all of which she politely but firmly refused!
Why, on that Sunday afternoon visit, she had gotten it into her head to make me the sole beneficiary of her sacred pies I will never understand. I carefully wrote it out in longhand as Aunt Catherine read out the recipe from her faded and creased paper that was written in her own hand sometime in the 1930's. When I was finished writing, we started to make a pie together... apple it was. Though I'd never been much of a cook (a fact which puzzled me as to why she chose me to pass it on to), I quickly became engrossed in mixing and rolling out dough and slicing apples. She supervised the entire process with absolute authority, correcting me where needed, and waving her wooden spoon in the air many times to punctuate the importance of doing this or that! I was laughing so hard by the end of it; flour streaked on my face and hers, bits of unbaked pie crust dotting the countertop and floor all around us. It was one of my last visits with her before she passed away, and so it remains a very cherished memory. After her passing, some of my family members searched for her recipe but it was never found. Did she decide to destroy it after I copied it?
I'm so ashamed to say, I never had the chance to try it out on my own, being so young and so not into baking when the baton had been passed on to me. When I came home that day, I had tucked the recipe away in a safe place (you know about those safe places...so safe that you can never find them again), and forgot about it, other than when the holidays would roll around and I would wish I had it at hand for Thanksgiving and Christmas family dinners. I'd made some unfruitful attempts at finding it and when I couldn't, I felt so wretched and such an ingrate.
Just a few weeks ago with the holidays approaching, I thought of it again. This time I went down to the garage, firmly resolved to find it. So many boxes of things that I shamefully had never unpacked after moving here, and filled with things that I had completely forgotten about! I unpacked stuff for hours, but never came across it. :(
Until now! I just walked through the garage and in a partially opened box behind a ladder that had eluded my earlier search, I spied a brown manila envelope just crammed with papers... and thumbing through them, there in the midst of them was my aunt's secret pie crust recipe!
If she were here I'd hugely hug her for placing it where I could find it, just before the holidays. Thank you Aunt Catherine!
