In Cold Blood
CHERRY PIE
When it comes to pie I am an equal-opportunity eater—unless sour cherries are involved. Sour cherry pie wins, every time. When I was a kid I was a huge fan of the individual-size Hostess cherry pies that came in those waxy white wrappers. They were filled with thick, cherry-flavored goop and studded with pieces of… cherry? I’m not sure if they were actually cherries or some distant, factory-produced Frankenstein cousin, but they certainly did the trick for me at the time. I used to walk to Fells Market almost every day after school to get one, washing it down with a Cherry Coke on my walk home. Until I was in my late teens I thought that was what cherry pie tasted like, so when I had an actual, homemade sour cherry pie for the first time, it was an absolute revelation.
Ever since reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood a few years ago, I never eat or make a cherry pie without thinking of Nancy Clutter. Her final act as the most wholesome and blameless woman on earth is teaching her teenage neighbor, Jolene Katz, how to make the perfect cherry pie—her blue-ribbon winner with its “oven-hot cherries simmering under the crisp lattice crust.”
After the book was published, a writer for Best Life magazine dug up Nancy Clutter’s actual cherry pie recipe, which I was so excited about, until I found out that dear Nancy used frozen premade piecrust and frozen cherries in her version. Frozen cherries I can abide, because cherries are in season for only a short time, but a premade crust won’t do. These days, I spend a good deal of time at the Meat Hook reconstituting rendered lard into biscuits and cookies. When early summer comes around and berries start popping up in the markets, I usually focus my lard reconstituting on piecrusts so that our customers can enjoy the season properly—that is, with a freshly made piecrust that contains both butter and real lard. What is real lard? you ask. Real lard, the very best lard for baking, comes from pigs.
On Tuesdays at the shop we get our pigs delivered—usually between four and eight of them. No matter how many times I’ve completed the ritual of the delivery—cleaning off the tables, walking out to the truck, ducking under the weight of the pig and carrying it inside, laying it on the table, and breaking it down into its primals—I am always amazed by how quickly and smoothly and quietly it all happens.
Once the pigs are on the table, the first step in breaking them down is removing the kidney fat—or “leaf lard”—that lies in a smooth, white layer over the pig’s abdomen. It comes off without a knife in three or four clean, satisfying yanks. Once it’s off we grind it and render it and it becomes the silky, odorless lard of your baking dreams. This stuff is truly magical; it is precisely what Crisco is attempting to mimic with its vegetable shortening, but in my opinion it does an infinitely better job, in terms of both flavor and texture.
I like to think that Capote—who spent his early years living with his aunts, the Faulks, on a farm in Monroeville, Alabama, where they raised chickens and turkeys and smoked hogs in their smokehouse—would have turned up his nose at a premade piecrust. Living off the land that surrounded them, the Faulks ate well. Breakfast was the most important meal of the day there, and, according to Gerald Clarke’s biography of Capote, would include “an almost excessive display of the land’s bounty”—pork chops and collard greens, cornbread, black-eyed peas, ham and eggs, catfish, squirrel, grits and gravy, raw milk, pound cake with homemade preserves, and coffee made with chicory. His favorite aunt, Sook, combed the woods for pecans to put in her Christmas fruitcakes, and foraged for roots and herbs with which she made medicinal teas. Having spent his childhood surrounded by this kind of farm-to-table plentitude, Capote would have loved this pie.
IN COLD BLOOD
Cherry Pie
If you are a vegetarian or otherwise anti-lard, you can substitute vegetable shortening or butter (but don’t use the hydrogenated lard sold in supermarkets). And if you can find only sweet cherries instead of sour, you’ll need to increase the amount of lemon juice to 3 or 4 teaspoons.
Serves 8
Crust
2½ cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, cut into ¼-inch cubes and frozen
½ cup rendered leaf lard, cut into 6 pieces and frozen
¼ cup ice-cold water
¼ cup chilled vodka
1 large egg
1 tablespoon cream
Filling
¾ cup sugar
¼ cup cornstarch
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
2 pounds sour cherries, pitted and halved
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cubed
Make the Crust:
Combine 1½ cups of the flour, 2 tablespoons of the sugar, and the salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse four times. Add the frozen butter and lard and process until the dough just begins to collect and none of the flour is uncoated, 15 to 20 seconds. Add the remaining 1 cup flour and pulse five times, until pea-sized lumps appear throughout.
Transfer the mixture to a bowl and add the ice-cold water and vodka, using a rubber spatula to gently bring the dough together. It might seem stickier or tackier than you’re used to, but all of the vodka will evaporate when baked, so don’t fret!
Divide the dough into two even pieces and shape them into balls, being careful not to overhandle. Tightly wrap them in plastic and put them in the refrigerator to chill for at least 2 hours.
After 2 hours, roll out each ball of dough into a 12-inch round on a floured work surface. Stack them on a plate with a layer of greased parchment between them, put them back in the fridge, and preheat the oven to 425°F.
Make the Filling:
Whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, and salt and then add the cherries, lemon juice, and vanilla. Remove the pie dough from the refrigerator and press one round into a 9-inch pie plate. Add the cherry filling, mounding it slightly in the center, and scatter the butter cubes all over the cherries.
Brush the edge of the bottom piecrust with water and gently drape the top crust over the cherries. Fold the excess dough from the bottom crust over the excess dough from the top crust and crimp them together with the tines of a fork.
Cut several vents in the top crust to allow the steam to exit.
Mix the egg and cream together, brush the egg wash all over the crust, and dust with the remaining 1 tablespoon sugar.
Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 375°F and continue baking until the crust is golden brown and the filling is bubbling, about 1 hour more. If the crust is getting brown too quickly, tent foil over it and continue to bake.