Pies at the Bar 10

The bride's lesson

Today’s story is a completely different version of a story in my first book, Pie Every Day.

After I married, I moved to a small town in Ohio where my husband was a reporter for the county newspaper, a job he loved. I loved my job as a community organizer in Atlanta, Georgia. His was more stable and paid better. My project would shut down at the end of the year. And so I moved in with him and commenced a fruitless three months hunt for a job even remotely related to my degree in writing or experience in social work. In the end, it was my prodigious history of waitressing that led to being hired as the morning waitress at the Bar 10, a restaurant that was considered the best in town.

Around 1960—WAY before my time but still looked the same.

My shift started as soon as the owner unlocked the front door at seven a.m. Responsibilities included setting up all the tables, helping to cook breakfast orders when the woman chef was busy with the daily specials, and making sure the coffee cups of the farmers sitting at the bar were kept topped off. The town was the county seat and brought in lawyers and judges from the courthouse across the street for lunch. I left for home around three, after the last of them finished their bowls of turtle soup.

Betty was the midday waitress, always dressed in a neat white pantsuit, her white hair a flurry of varnished curls. She steamed through the door at ten, followed by her husband and son carrying a dozen pies. Her station up front across from the bar was the busiest in the place, but she was so proficient that she was frequently able to take possession of the corner by the ice machine where she smoked and gossiped about her customers. She loathed the assistant cook and her bawdy stories about her boyfriends and regularly told the night waitress she was an idiot for living with a man who would never marry her. She didn’t care if no one liked her. She was loved well enough for her pies.

She immediately grouped me with all the other women in the kitchen. I was the worst waitress she’d ever seen, a college graduate with no understanding of the world’s hard realities. But I was quiet and industrious and eventually she warmed up to me because she had once been a young bride herself whose finances had been just as precarious as mine. She was very eager to give me marital advice that usually emphasized perseverance and determination. A few months passed by with a lot more marital advice when she suddenly wrote out on the back of a chit her recipe for banana cream pie. She had served my husband several times and, like the great waitress she was, recalled he ordered a slice of banana cream pie whenever it was on the menu. Her gift came with her firm opinion that men are simple and pie helps to keep them happy.

I haven’t made one yet but this is the idea.

I felt as if she had given me her secret to a long, fruitful marriage. At a time when I was trying mighty hard to find my footing in this strange new life, her recipe struck me as an essential equation that went something like this:

My husband loves pies + I learn to make pies = We will be forever one

The pie I made that night started with the dough sticking to the rolling pin and stretching across the pan in a thin droopy sheet full of holes. But the filling and the bananas were perfect. Since the custard needed to sit for a few hours, I planned to put the meringue on just before dinner and let it brown while we ate. My husband came home trailed by a few of his coworkers carrying six-packs of beer. A few more potatoes were added to the stew as they settled around the table. Most of the beer was gone by the time dinner was ready to be served. My husband opened a bottle of wine and I disappeared into the kitchen to whip the egg whites into a meringue and spread it across the pie in swirling peaks. The pie went back into the oven and I accepted a full wine glass as I took the chair closest to the kitchen. Halfway through the meal, smoke seeped from the sides of the loose oven door. The meringue was a sooty mess.

Here was my first important lesson about pie-making—a blemished pie can almost always be salvaged. The crust and the filling were still okay when I scraped off the meringue and made some more. This time, I stood right in front of the oven while the white fluff browned. The men devoured the pie; my husband scooped out the remains before washing the dishes.

Betty continued my pie education; the other women in the kitchen joined in. Crusts caused a particularly raucous debate. Betty favored Crisco. The cook swore by lard. The owner’s wife claimed margarine produced the flakiest crust. The assistant cook bought her pies at the bakery next to the hardware store. After consulting one of the cookbooks I had received as a wedding present, I suggested that butter was supposed to be the best. The women all hooted about its needless extravagance. I never revealed that I began to follow the cookbook’s notion that a superb crust could be achieved with the use of equal shares of butter and lard.

There’s truth in believing that pie baking helped me through that first year and all the years after I left the Bar 10. A certain amount of satisfying competency developed when I finally grasped a pie’s simple, yet intricate, steps and understood all the different things that affect its outcome: are the ingredients cold enough; is the flour too dry, the air too humid; have I used too much water or overworked the dough; have I, even for the briefest moment, allowed my concentration to slip? Do I know how to accept failure and gained the fortitude to try once more?

I think of Betty and how she managed to make her daily allotment of pies while babysitting her grandson, straightening up her house, and packing a hefty lunch for her husband. All the while she was creating her pies that added an extra bit of security to her family’s budget. She was certainly a hard woman to be around but the taste of her pies lingered in many people’s mind as a moment of delight amidst an otherwise ordinary day for a long time after they left the Bar 10.

I once asked her how she managed to create what I thought then was an impossibility.

“You do it,” she said as if life was as easy as making a pie.

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