(Un)Traditional Peach Pie

Soundtrack: Connie Converse's So Sad, So Lovely, First Aid Kit's The Lion's Roar, Cary Ann Hearst's "American Made Machine" and "Are You Ready to Die?," Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" and "Big Yellow Taxi," Joan Baez's "Diamonds and Rust," and Mumford & Sons' "Awake My Soul."

Yesterday my friend and supervisor, Kate, came over and we made a peach pie. I anticipated it would be pretty standard, a traditional pie, sort of like the way this woman describes baking a perfect peach pie: Farmers' market peaches, lattice-top pie crust, whole wheat flour to add an "earthy note that complements the sweet peaches."

I bought seven peaches from La Casa del Pueblo, the largest grocery store near me. The recipe calls for six cups, so I thought seven would be plenty, and probably leave some over.

She came in, looking fresh and lovely, her hair pulled back in a bun, wisps of brown hair around her neck and face. Kate is natural and easy, and exudes peace and kindness. It is easy talking to her. She washed the peaches, and I peeled them. Peaches have such a special scent: They are warm and sweet--summer embodied. I love their soft skins (the ones I was slicing away with a little knife and tossing into the garbage).

All seven peaches added up to about five cups! What! We walked to the corner market, which of course didn't have peaches, so we bought a mango. As I mixed the flour, salt, and oil to make the crust that I padded down into the pie plate (rolling it out didn't work out so well), Kate mixed the peaches, mango, flour, sugar, and cinnamon together in a big red bowl. She couldn't find the lemon juice in the fridge (it was with the vinegars, oops) so she cut up and juiced a lime instead. When the delicious-smelling mix was in the pie crust, I pressed pie dough into pieces between my fingers and dappled the crust.

While it baked at 425 for forty minutes, we went outside to look at my downstairs neighbor's beehive. Kate loves bees (BEES!).

We ate our slices of pie in the little park across the street. The pie is tasty--messy, a little tropical, and sweet. The crust is savory and measures out the sweetness of the peaches and mango.

Bittersweet Chocolate Cake

There are many ways to describe what makes a cookbook. For one, statistics--number of pages, number of color photographs, number of recipes. And so on.

But there is still another element involved in this newest Good Housekeeping Cookbook--the same element that has been involved in every edition, beginning with the first one in 1903. That element is the people element.

Yesterday I slept in with the cats and woke up to voices in the living room. Elise's friend is photographing her for a journalism course she's taking. Elise is so photogenic, I bet the pictures will be beautiful. I had a headache and felt groggy. On my days off, I have to come up with reasons to get up in the morning. Clean the bathroom. Grocery shop. Feeding the cats is reason enough, and helps to order my days.

I went to the grocery shop and bought the ingredients for a bittersweet chocolate cake. I wanted a change from pies, and I'd used the first two recipes in the cake section. Bittersweet felt appropriate.

I didn't plan to bake. I thought I'd save it for today. But after scrubbing the shower curtain, cleaning the mirror, playing with the cats, and scooping litter, I was so bored. I read the section on cake-making tips and decided to go ahead and do it.

Here is the Good Housekeeping bittersweet chocolate cake with a marshmallow frosting and chocolate swirls:

love that seventies dishware!

Wow. Well, that is ambitious. Those photos are so optimistic. I wonder if anyone ever looks at them and thinks: Yep, mine'll look just like that. How does that even happen? I feel like you need more than your ex-boyfriend's two square cake tins and vegan butter substitute. I am just setting out to make a chocolate cake that isn't uneven, and maybe, just maybe, there won't be crumbs speckling the frosting.

Letters from readers tell us of their love affair with the Cookbook. With old editions that have been handed down from mother to daughter to daughter. For example, a recent letter speaks of a 1927 edition. "It has been in constant use all these years. The poor thing has finally given up. What can I do to hold it together for a few more years?

The first piece of advice Good Housekeeping offers, nay, demands of their good readers, is: DON'T SUBSTITUTE. But I don't even know what shortening really is (lard?) so I used Earth Balance again. I just don't know what the effect is with the change. The cakes are really flat. Look:

wut?

"Measurements must be exact, fool," says Good Housekeeping. Well, the teaspoon is in the bag with the cat supplement and I don't feel like rinsing it out so...eh, that's about a teaspoon. And about three squares of unsweetened chocolate? About that amount of the semi-sweet chocolate should work. Right? Wait, why is the cake still white and why is it so flat? Must be the oven...

Then there are the younger women, just beginning their lives as wives and homemakers. One of these wrote us to say, "I will be married soon and I need to learn to cook something more complicated than frozen pizza, which is the extent of my present skill. I need a cookbook that tells me why and how--not just a collection of recipes."

On my way to Kopi Cafe to write this entry aaaaand take advantage of their half-priced bottles of wine (btw, the place doesn't have wifi, which is insane), I ran into Stevie. He's a young artist I met through Elise.  It serendipitous, since I had just been thinking of him. My phone doesn't keep phone numbers, so if someone hasn't text recently, I don't have the number. The other day I was wishing I had his number. Like a scene from a sitcom, there he was, just standing on a corner when I crossed the street. We hugged and he said he'd just been to Tulip, hoping to see me there. I invited him to join me for wine, but he couldn't. We kissed goodbye. It was lingering, and I immediately thought: I don't want to be this way. He then told me he had a boyfriend, but "he's in New Orleans, so they're open while he's away."

I'm not interested in that type of thing anymore. Honestly, I'm not sure I'm interested in much of anything anymore.

Baking offers a fantasy of an old-fashioned lifestyle. A home, a family, and routine. I like all those things, and when I'm not with my family I'm good at making family groupings where I am. For over a year Chris, Elise, Dudley, and I were my imagined family in Chicago. Now it's Elise, me, and the cats. It's a cozy little family. Maybe I should have stopped the above sentence at "Baking offers a fantasy."

And so this newest edition of our cookbook contains a great measure of inspiration from our readers. It is for them and for all those women across the country whose busy lives vary in many ways bu who have one great common interest--a dedication to keeping their families well and happily fed and to making food preparation a creative and satisfying experience.

The cake is small, but pretty.

And like my cat, Noreen, who has stared Death down with her big green eyes and said "Not yet," it's really tough. Great qualities in a cat, less so in a cake.

"I'll go when I'm good and ready."

I woke up this morning resolved to throw the cake away. When I came into the kitchen, Elise was there. "I'm going to have a great day," she said, "Because I started my day off with cake and coffee!"

Alright, cake, you win.

We put our new book into your hands with the firm conviction that it is the best cookbook ever.

Willie Mae Rogers
Director, Good Housekeeping Institute 1973