Pie Is Better Than Cake

And it is better than every food, and better than basically every thing.

Illustration by the author.

I’m searching my mind to think of the first time I made a pie. I don’t think this was it, but I do recall this time my grandma came to visit — I must have been, like, 14, because I wasn’t vegan yet — and I put together an apple pie using a crust from the store. It wasn’t pie dough that you could roll and do what you wanted with, but I pulled the crust out of the tinfoil packaging it came in, let it warm up, and rolled it into a ball. Then I rolled the ball flat, put it back in the tin, and ultimately told my grandma I’d made the crust myself, from scratch. She said, “Mmmm. What did you make this with?” I did not want to tell her I’d made it with a store bought pie crust that I’d mashed up and bastardized, so I said, “butter.” “Oh, well, no wonder,” she said, like women always say in movies when someone says “butter.”

I’ve tried a lot of pie crust recipes since then; I’ve done trendy things like integrating spelt flour or using vodka in the crust. Since the pie for Grandma, I estimate that I have made 500 pies. That’s a respectable number for a regular old home cook without a food blog or anything. (I mean, sure: this is a blog, and this particular entry is about food, but you know what I’m trying to say.) The recipe I use is modified from the “Joy of…