Stir (16 page)

I like to use two or three different kinds of apples in this pie, some tart and crisp, like Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, or Macoun, and one or two of a juicier, sweeter variety, like McIntosh. That way the filling is pleasingly fluid, without oozing all over your plate. The crackly sugar shell here is adapted from a recipe in Ruth Reichl's
Comfort Me with Apples
.

Now, let's talk piecrust.

It's simple, in theory. Cut butter into flour and add just enough water to form a cohesive dough. That's how I did it for years, making sure to follow the rules: cold butter cut into pea-sized chunks, large enough to visibly marble the dough when flattened beneath a rolling pin. That butter would melt in the oven, leaving air pockets between layers of flour to form a nice, flaky crust. Mindful of gluten development—too much means a tough crust—I'd add as little water as possible and take care not to overwork the dough. It all made sense to me.

But cutting butter into flour is imprecise. Every time you do it, there's variation in how much dry flour, completely loose from butter, remains in the mixture. That means variation, too, in how much water you'll need for the dough to come together. Most piecrust recipes list a range of water amounts because it depends. You learn to adjust the water by a tablespoon here and there, and with a little practice, your piecrusts turn out great.

What if you're new at this, though, and you'd like to get it right on your very first try? For this book, I wanted a recipe with exact measurements that would lead to a perfect flakey, buttery piecrust every time. Even if you've never made a piecrust in your life.

I found exactly that in J. Kenji López-Alt's column “The Food Lab” on the website Serious Eats. Kenji's secret lies in a “fat-flour paste,” as he calls it, which eliminates variation in the flour-butter mixture. You make the paste by incorporating the butter into just two-thirds of the flour, processing it in a food processor or cutting, rubbing, and squeezing it by hand until the mixture is the consistency of Play-Doh. (You don't have to worry about too much gluten developing from overmixing at this stage. The proteins in flour need water to form gluten, and you haven't yet added any.) This fat-flour paste—essentially flour particles completely coated in fat—functions completely
as
fat. You then add the remaining bit of flour and a set amount of water that no longer varies batch to batch because you know exactly how much flour you're dealing with. It's brilliant and produces the best piecrusts I've ever made.

I always recommend measuring by weight instead of volume when baking. Here especially, since the volume measurements are a little fussy. Note that a scant ½ cup in this case means removing only about a teaspoon or so from the cup.

For the pie dough:

¾ cup plus 3 tablespoons (118 grams) + a scant ½ cup (59 grams) all-purpose flour, divided

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

½ teaspoon fine sea salt

10 tablespoons (142 grams) unsalted butter, cut into ¼-inch cubes

3 tablespoons cold water

For the filling:

2½ pounds (5 to 7 medium) apples (see headnote)

¼ packed cup (50 grams) dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon cornstarch

1 teaspoon cinnamon

¼ teaspoon fine sea salt

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons apple brandy, like Calvados

For the topping:

½ cup (1 stick; 113 grams) unsalted butter, cut into pieces

¾ cup (150 grams) granulated sugar

¾ cup (94 grams) all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon nutmeg

Make the pie dough:

Stir together the ¾ cup plus 3 tablespoons (118 grams) flour, sugar, and salt in a medium-sized bowl. Add the cubed butter to the bowl. Use your hands to rub, squeeze, and squish the butter together with the dry ingredients to form a homogenous, not-at-all-sandy fat-flour paste with the consistency of Play-Doh. It will take a few minutes. Cover with plastic and chill in the freezer for 10 minutes.

Remove the fat-flour paste from the freezer and spread the dough around the bowl with a rubber spatula. Add the scant ½ cup (59 grams) flour and work it in with your hands until it's just incorporated. Sprinkle with the water, then fold and press the dough with the rubber spatula until it comes together into a ball. Form the dough into a 4-inch disk, wrap tightly in plastic, and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

Alternatively, you can make the dough in a food processor. (It's faster, but you end up with more dishes to clean.) Combine the ¾ cup plus 3 tablespoons (118 grams) flour in the bowl of a food processor and pulse twice. Add the cubed butter, and pulse until the flour is fully incorporated and the dough begins to clump around the blades (25 to 30 pulses). Spread the dough around the bowl with a rubber spatula, sprinkle with the scant ½ cup (59 grams) flour, and give it 3 to 5 short pulses. Transfer the dough to a large bowl, sprinkle with the water, and continue with the by-hand directions above.

Prepare the filling:

Rub together the dark brown sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, and salt in a large bowl. Wash, dry, but do not peel the apples, and cut them into ½-inch slices. Pile the apples into the bowl on top of the sugar mixture, sprinkle with the lemon juice and brandy, and mix gently with your hands.

Assemble the pie:

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Remove the pie dough from the fridge, and let sit until rollable but still cold. Flour your counter, and roll out the dough with a rolling pin into an 11-inch circle. Transfer the dough to a 9-inch pie plate. Crimp or flute the edges, if you'd like. Pile the apple filling into the shell—you'll have a huge heaping mound, but it will shrink down in the oven—and put into the fridge while you make the topping.

Make the topping:

Melt the cut-up stick of unsalted butter in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the sugar and stir well. Turn the heat down to low and add the nutmeg and flour, stirring to form a thick paste. Remove from the heat, grab the filled pie from the fridge and, using a rubber spatula, spread the paste over the apples. You don't want to cover the apples completely; they should peek out here and there. This “venting” keeps the apples from steaming and turning to mush.

Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 350 degrees and bake for another 35 to 40 minutes, until the pie is golden brown on top and bubbling. Let cool to room temperature, or just above, before slicing to give the filling a chance to set up.

Serves 8 or more.

T
he day before I left the hospital in Burlington, I'd spoken with my friend Hila on the phone. “Jess, my darling,” she said, in her thick Israeli accent, “when you get home, we will take care of you. Whether you like it or not, we will. This is what is going to happen.”

Poor Hila had no idea what she was getting herself into. Nor did any of my other friends who, like Hila, were dead set on figuring out what I needed and how to give it to me. They took mornings off from work to escort me to doctors' appointments and held my hand during needle sticks and ultrasounds. Hila drove me to the hospital one morning with a big orange jug of my own urine, carried it inside, then took me out for lunch, cracking jokes the whole way. Sunny stopped by with books on tape. Caroline sent crystals. David and Amy came over on Halloween Eve with their three little girls, the five of them dressed as Iron Maiden, and rocked out in our living room on invisible guitars. Faraway friends wrote letters, sent mix CDs, and a subscription to Netflix. They told me their news. Sarah was falling in love. Sarit was pregnant. With twins! Mary walked me around and around the block, then sat rubbing my shins and the back of my head where I still had all the feeling.

And, of course, they cooked.

Every night, someone and something would show up at our door. There were Lila's chocolate truffles and Elisha's cookies. Rachel made vegetable croquettes and Liba a pot of her curry. I didn't have a taste for much of it, but I was relieved to know that Eli had something to eat, and that it was good.

Then sometimes, my own hunger would surprise me. I'd be curled up on the love seat in my usual unhungry state, hear a knock at the door, and some food would appear that would wake my appetite right up. It happened first with bean soup. My friend Jonathan dropped it by one day, just something he'd thrown together, he said. It smelled wonderful. I spotted kidney beans and navy beans. They were perfectly cooked, with delicate skins stretched tightly around plump, tender middles. I took a bite. The soup tasted of meat despite not containing a scrap of it. The broth was thick and smooth like gravy, and the beans were creamy inside, like chicken liver mousse. I could feel my body rushing to accept it, my hunger spurred on by the consumption of food, and not the other way around.

Hummus from our neighbor David had the same effect. He once told me how he made it, soaking and cooking the chickpeas, then peeling every last one before blending them with sesame paste into the smoothest purée. He'd fill two wide, shallow bowls with the still-warm hummus, nestle hard-boiled eggs, olives, and pickles into the drifts, and carry them down the hall to us on a wooden tray. We'd scoop it into our mouths with oven-warmed pita from David's favorite Armenian bakery and, when the bread was gone, eat the rest of the hummus off spoons, like leftover frosting.

I was a guest in my own home those days, eating other people's food off plates that belonged to me. Once I was strong enough, I was a guest outside my home, too. Friday nights with our friends were back on.

We went to Eitan and Julia's, as before, but now we brought only ourselves. In this and many respects, I was a terrible guest. I'd spit food into napkins and push vegetables around on my plate. My taste buds were still up to no good. Yet Julia made feasts. A buttery mushroom soup flecked with thyme, salads with olives and feta, giant potato pancakes sliced like pizzas, bird after bird after bird. When she hit upon something I enjoyed, she'd pack up the rest to go.

One of these things was farro, a tender Italian grain that feels nice to bite into. I'd heard of it, but never tried it until that night at our friends' table. Julia had cooked up a pot and mixed it with peas, which tasted funny to me, but the farro itself was perfect: chewy, lightly sticky, with a flavor that was nutty and bright. No one blinked when I picked out the peas and ate only the grain. Nor did they mind when, wiped out from the act, I retreated to the sofa, uncapped my disfigured head, and flattened myself along the cushions for the remainder of the meal.

Being sick, it turns out, is an education in the art of guesting. I didn't see it that way at the time, likely because I didn't know that there were important things still to learn.

The phrase “gracious host” rolls off the tongue. We all know what it is to be one. What it means to guest with grace is trickier, because it's not what it might seem. A good guest, we think, is an easy guest. A considerate one. She arrives on time with a bottle of wine or maybe a gift, some chocolate or homemade jam. She asks what she can do. She wants to help. She insists.

What these best of intentions miss is the most basic thing of all: that a good guest allows herself to be hosted. That means saying, “yes, please,” when you're offered a cup of tea, instead of rushing to get it yourself. It means staying in your chair, enjoying good company and your first glass of wine while your host ladles soup into bowls. If your host wants to dress the salad herself and toss it the way she knows how, let her, because a host is delighted to serve. To allow her to take care of you is to allow your host her generosity. I'd always been too distracted by my own desire to be useful to understand this. I got it now.

I missed hosting a lot. I missed the gathering of thoughts that happens when you're deciding what's for dinner, the turning around of the menu in your mind, rotating one thing in, one thing out, simplifying, paring down. I missed making lists. I missed the ordering of time that hosting entails. I missed knowing with any degree of accuracy what I could accomplish in a set amount of minutes or hours, being able to hurry up if I needed to, or stand at the stovetop for a few minutes more if the mushrooms were slow to brown.

Since moving to Cambridge, Eli and I had hosted a Chanukah party every year. We invited everyone we knew. Eli would spend days in the kitchen frying up potato latkes, the regular kind plus a few batches of sweet potato curry, my favorite. We'd cut crudités and make savory spreads, mashing herbs into goat cheese and yogurt, whipping feta with roasted red peppers. Eli would make cranberry applesauce, and for my part, I'd bake: carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, Mexican wedding cookies, and Marcella's butter almond cake, of course.

That Chanukah would be our fourth in Cambridge. “Join us,” we wrote on the invitation, “for an evening of food, friends, and fire, as we celebrate survival against all odds.” The message would have been appropriate on Chanukah any year; this year, we felt it all the more.

It was important to me to do it up right. We couldn't scale back. That would feel even more depressing than not doing it at all. (Fortunately, these were the years before we added homemade toffee to the list, and mini chocolate tarts, and molasses sandwich cookies.) We would need help, and Eitan and Julia were ready. They peeled potatoes over paper bags while Eli chopped onions in the kitchen. Meanwhile, I drew a party map as I had each year, pairing bowls with dips and platters with desserts, diagramming where on which tables each dish should go and which utensils we'd put out to serve them. The party map had always been our key for moving things swiftly along in the last hours before people arrived. This year, it was especially useful. I could plan out the entire party, and others could make it happen.

When it came time to bake, Eli joined me in the kitchen. I did what I could, scooping and measuring and missing the bowl, my one eye playing tricks on me as I went. When I got tired, I'd sit and read the recipe aloud, and Eli would take over the job. My frosting powers gravely diminished—again thanks to the nonseeing eye—I passed the job along to the others. Everyone was so careful, so generous in their efforts to do things exactly as I would have. Eitan turned out to be a natural, sweeping the spatula around the edges of the cupcakes to form tidy white caps and pressing a single walnut down into each one.

Smells had been returning slowly for weeks, in one nostril, at least. Eli had tested me with the contents of our spice rack after I'd smelled the cucumber that night. I'd closed my eyes and sniffed each jar. There was often something there. Something, though I couldn't tell just what it was. Or I could tell, I was sure, and I'd be totally wrong. “Bubble gum!” I'd insisted, over and over, until I opened my eyes and saw the jar of cinnamon in Eli's outstretched fist. It was a surprise and a relief, then, to smell the latkes as they fried, the applesauce simmering away, to smell the cinnamon smelling like cinnamon.

The party was familiar and fun. Then fatigue hit hard at the end of the night and I had to lie down. I was embarrassed slinking off to the bedroom, but a few friends followed and climbed up with me onto the bed. Sarah propped a pillow behind my back; Adena brought me a cookie and a cup of tea. We finished out the party right there, my friends hosting me again in my own home—on my own bed!—only I no longer thought of it that way. The English words “guest” and “host” live in opposing camps: the inviter and the invitee; the welcomer and the welcomed; the provider and the provided for. In other languages, there is no such divide. The French
hôte
means host
and
guest. Context assigns the meaning. That night, I was both.