The Pie I’ll Never Shut Up About

One of the quiet joys of being a restaurant pastry chef is that you arrive early, typically before anyone else, probably just an hour or two after the last of the line cooks are done scrubbing and sanitizing the splashbacks and lowboys. The room invariably still smells like degreaser and leftover wine, no matter how immaculate. That is, at least until you pop your first espresso shot, then a third and a fourth. Here you make yourself a kind of force field. You get to take time to enjoy the kind of inspiration that being alone in a giant kitchen full of your tools and favorite recipes might bring.

Recipe: Buttermilk Chess Pie

On those mornings, I would use my early arrival as a chance to thumb through my cookbooks. Some of these books were by renowned pastry chefs, but a majority were castoffs from rummage sales and “free” bins at the library. They were full of recipes that people once exchanged verbally before eventually typing them up and binding them with plastic spirals. In these volumes, I found inspiration and personal stories — and often scrap papers with handwritten recipes tucked among the pages.

Then I would get to work on my own recipes. I would roll out a dozen or two pie shells to pop in a freezer and begin my near-daily dance with buttermilk chess pies, where I would be at the center of a carefully choreographed performance of whisking, filling, baking, rotating, cooling.

While it was a very simple recipe, I had, without knowing it, created quite an art of the thing. Timing was essential: never missing a step, never letting my timer outsmart my sense of smell, never letting a young baker crack the door too soon to check thewiggle. I aimed for nothing less than a particular type of perfection with that pie. I knew it, and it knew me. It wasn’t quite right unless the crackle appeared on top, the edges were flaky and tender and the bottom was both crisp and soft.