Addy's Cherry Pie

You weren't the only one who had to celebrate their birthday in quarantine this year...

Alright, so, my plans for this post are definitely not what they originally were. Actually, my plans for this entire month (and the rest of the foreseeable future!) have been really thrown off, and I bet we all can guess why. 

(COVID-19, for anyone who's reading this years in the future, or jumping forward in time to 2020 and wondering where everyone is.) 

I had grand plans for this month, with lots of cool historical recipes to share, and then grocery stores started emptying of the supplies I needed, my job was threatened by closures of repositories and libraries we use to conduct research for our clients, and everyone got a little worried about going outside for any reason, meaning last minute trips out to get one or two niche ingredients seemed ill advised at best and generally really, really irresponsible. Needless to say, I've also been pretty bummed out, and mental health struggles makes doing stuff that requires a lot of energy - like making content for this blog! - hard. 

But I'm lucky that I'm still healthy right now, currently still (fingers crossed) employed, and am quarantined with my awesome wife, who made Addy this awesome birthday pie I'm going to take a minute to share with you. Read on to see some more pictures and some pie facts.

Addy enjoys a cherry pie in Happy Birthday, Addy! to celebrate her tenth birthday. While she was enslaved, Addy wasn't allowed to celebrate her birthday, and her mother wasn't allowed to mark the day, so the best approximation she had of her daughter's age was that she was born in early spring. Addy chooses her birthday as April 9th, the day Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the Civil War. 

The pie was included in two accessory sets, and the original version with the pie slices and ice cream as separate pieces has been on my wish list since I was a little kid. The revised one is nice too, but I've never been one to turn down more doll food.

A fruit pie would be a special treat for any kid growing up in the 1860's, and its filling would often be homemade using fresh or canned fruit for kids who grew up in more rural settings whose families had orchards. For city dwellers like Addy, pies could still be made with fresh or personally preserved ingredients, but commercially canned products were becoming more common and affordable for the average person. We went this route for Addy's pie, as Jess bought a tin of cherry pie filling a while ago and we'd never had reason to use it. When I mentioned I was feeling bummed because so many of my blog ideas were shelved for the time being, she kindly offered to make the pie using the can and with a new recipe for pie crust she'd been wanting to test out.

Addy's pie has a lattice top. This technique has a long history in pastry, and could be extremely ornate and beautiful. It's suggested by food historians that creating a knotted or layered pattern for pastry dates back to the 16th century, when architecture fell in love with trellises and baking followed soon after. Although these really ornate designs didn't really catch on with the average home baker, it remains a common technique for many American fruit pies. 

Besides looking beautiful, it allows the filling to vent without exploding or oozing too badly. 

I have to admit, I prefer pies with more pastry up top, as does Jess, but we're sticklers for authenticity when making people sized versions of AG food.

So this wasn't exactly the same happy occasion as Addy's tenth birthday, but it was a bright spot in an otherwise pretty depressing spring. The pie crust was particularly successful this time, as Jess found a recipe that encourages making the dough in your stand mixer to prevent melting the butter in your hands and resulting in a more delicate pastry. That's always something I'd love to time travel to talk to someone about: how did you make tasty pie and pastry when you weren't working in a fancy kitchen with an ice box or fancy marble slabs to help control the temperature of your fat when making pastry? Maybe next time I'm visiting a living history museum I should try to hunt down an interpreter baking something and pepper them with questions, although right now that feels very, very far away. 

Hope everyone is well and finding ways to keep themselves sane during this incredibly frustrating and depressing time!

Pie and historical fiction has definitely been a help for me!