Hello friends. This is not a Maryland recipe. I made this pie and wrote this essay on instagram on March 17th, five days after canceling a talk at the Pratt Library and beginning ‘social distancing’. I am posting it here so that I don’t go through all of July with no post, leaving me feeling even more isolated. I’ve made some recipes, but the writing isn’t coming – at least not the kind of writing I’d like to be doing. Lately, I mostly write from sadness, which is how I feel. The sadness I feel today is very different than the sadness of four months ago but I thought I’d share this post and the recipe. I will say that every connection I’ve made through Old Line Plate has brightened my day at some point so feel free to drop me a line and say hi.
Many of us are feeling very frail right now. Trapped in our homes – with loved ones if we are lucky – but also with our own mortality uncomfortably close and primed for scrutiny.
I did a lot of cooking on Sunday, as I always do on Sundays, in preparation for the week. Going through the motions, full of a sense of reluctantly prepping for something more important.
The best thing to do, I thought, was to celebrate being a mortal human.
I decided to make a chocolate bourbon pecan pie. A gilded lily if ever there was one.
Pecans, from Texas. My great-aunt has a tree in her yard. I have watched my grandmother sit at the table shelling pecans, picking the nut meats from their pesky hull. Chocolate, a bizarre seed fermented in its own fruit and then processed in alchemic industrial ways. Sugar, which so many innocent people have died for, leaving humanity irreparably changed in the wake of its intoxicating power. Bourbon – edible grains turned into poison for enjoyment. Wheat, vanilla, butter, eggs. All of these things coming together in my small kitchen, the nucleus of my own tiny life.
It is the recipe -the process- that reaches back outward, connecting across time. Partaking in the sharing of humanity’s culinary creations. Hundreds, maybe thousands of artists collaborating over generations, solving a problem together: How to use what is around us and to change it in predictable ways. To celebrate our peculiar relationship with the earth, but also to perform a kind of trickery. The suggestion -rife with original sin- is that what we’ve taken from the earth is not always quite good enough.
Humanity has not agreed on many things, but we have all agreed that this is necessary.
So we share instructions for how to make life better – or just one meal; even one bite. Transforming food is such a crucial element of self-care that it can be found nearly wherever there is human life, whether we are living through enslavement, starvation, abundance, or the darkest of times. I can’t say that recipes are a force for good. I think in the grand scheme of things they are neutral. It is in our power to make them a force for good. And we often do.
Recipe:
- 3 eggs
- 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons butter, melted
- 3/4 cup light corn syrup
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons bourbon
- 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 cup chopped pecans
- 1 cup semisweet chocolate morsels
- 1 unbaked (9-inch) pastry shell
Beat eggs to a froth in a mixing bowl. Add butter, mixing well. Add syrup, sugar, bourbon, flour, and vanilla. Mix well. Stir in pecans.
Sprinkle the chocolate into bottom of pastry shell and pour pecan mixture over-top. Bake at 350° for 1 hour or until set. Cool before slicing.
Adapted from “Pies & Pastry Cookbook” from the Southern Heritage Cookbook Library. Check out this Gravy podcast for more background information on this pie.
