Rose Levy Beranbaum - The Pie and Pastry Bible

BAKING BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Roses Christmas Cookies

A Passion for Chocolate

The Cake Bible

O, blackberry tart, with berries as big as your thumb, purple and black, and thick with juice, and a crust to endear them that will go to cream in your mouth, and both passing down with such a taste that will make you close your eyes and wish you might live for ever in the wideness of that rich moment.

Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley

SCRIBNER
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Text copyright 1998 by Cordon Rose, Inc.

Illustrations copyright 1998 by Laura Maestro

Photographs copyright 1998 by Gentl & Hyers/Edge

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Designed by Margery Cantor

Set in Minion and Trajan

Page 4 of the photo insert, Concord Grape Pie, styled and photographed by Rose Levy Beranbaum

Manufactured in the United States of America

5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beranbaum, Rose Levy.

The pie and pastry bible / Rose Levy Beranbaum.

p. cm.

Includes index.

1. Pies. 2. Pastry. I. Title.

TX773.B4478 1998

641.865dc21 98-42869

CIP

ISBN 0-684-81348-3

ISBN 978-0-6848-1348-6

eISBN 978-1-4391-3087-2

To my husband, Elliott R. Beranbaum, for the generous brilliance of his X-ray vision

To the memory of my mother, Lillian Wager Levy, pioneer dentist, from whom I derived my passion for my profession

To Chefs Arthur Oberholzer and Dieter Schorner, my pastry gurus

To my irreplaceable editor Maria D. Guarnaschelli, nurturer of my creative center, who gives her heart, mind, and soul 100 percent

The first year I was married, I lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and spent most of my time cooking my head off. I especially liked to make dessertsthe more complex, the better. I made Gteau St.-Honor, Zuppa Inglese, Napoleon, Dobos Torte every day of the week. No kidding. Word of my feats got out, and I was approached one day by another faculty wife at Amherst College (where my husband taught) who asked me to teach her how to make a pie crust. I was horrified. A pie crust? How in heavens name would I ever teach anyone how to do something as elusive and as complicated as that?

Everything changed when I began to edit this book. Just as I had with Roses book on cakes, I became mesmerized by pies. And since Rose is like Merlin in her ability to draw you in, it wasnt long before I became obsessed by pies. It took hold on a Sunday afternoon, as I left her apartment clutching a sliver of her pear pie. I saw as she sliced it how succulently juicy the pears were, yet there was no dripping of juice onto the pie plateall the juice seemed to cling to each slice of pear. I saw the crust as she was slicing itand it seemed crisp, crunchy, flakyand it was the most beautiful beige-brown against the juicy, holding-the-juice-to-themselves pears. When I got home and shared the treasure with my husband (reluctantly), I realized that Rose had transformed the meaning of pie for me.

I guess Im bound to get some people angry when I say that Ive always thought pies have needed Rose to lift them out of the homey, soggy, less-than-glamorous position theyve occupied in America. The fact is, nobody knows how to make them well anymore. In her ingenious, utterly meticulous way, Rose has reflected long and hard on just how to bring a pie to the level of greatness. She has devised ways that enable a crust to stay crisp beneath the most juicy fruit filling, by placing the pie plate on the oven floor. She makes a fruit more succulent by macerating it with sugar, carefully collecting the juice, and cooking it so that it caramelizes and can create a synthesis with the fruit when the pie is baked in the oven. Rose makes the most of fruit, too. She keeps whenever and wherever possible much of the fruit in her pies fresh, so that it wont lose its personality when it reaches our mouths, and she cooks just enough of the fruit to provide a juicy cushion.

I could go on in this way about each one of Roses recipes in this book, and I know everybody would think that I was writing a press release after a while. Ill try to be as composed as I can, but who else but Rose would go to Denmark and find out what Danish pastry is all about, and come back with recipes that make you swear youll make Danish pastry as often as you can. Who else but Rose would go to Austria, and to Hungary, zealously watching master strudel-makers stretch dough, and then come home and make it one hundred times in her apartment in New York, so she could get it just right for us? Who else but Rose would come up with a cream cheese crust whose taste and texture defy description?

I used to think, before I edited Roses first bible, that I made cakes as well as any home baker. Rose brought me to another level I didnt know existed. I began to make my cakes differently after that, and I also began to understand how important taste was to everything. Ill never add vanilla, or a strip of lemon zest, to a recipe again, whether its one from Rose or not, unless it smells wonderful and is of the highest quality. Ill never make pound cake unless all the ingredients are at room temperature. With this book, Ill go to the farmers market excited to find red currants, blueberries, Marionberries, sour cherries, and know with confidence that when I put them in one of Roses crusts, theyll lose none of their fresh, lustrous brilliance. Now finally, after thirty-three years of baking, and under Roses tutelage, am I ready to give the woman who asked me to teach her to make a pie, and roll a crust, the class she wanted.

Maria Guarnaschelli
Vice President and Senior Editor
Scribner

I have been thinking of this book as The Pastry Bible for ten years now, since the publication of The Cake Bible. But after much discussion, I decided to give it the title The Pie and Pastry Bible because I discovered that most people do not know exactly what pastry means or that pies are also pastry.

The Oxford dictionary defines pastry as: Dough made of flour, fat and water, used for covering pies or holding filling.

The writer couldnt have known the pleasure of a fresh tart cherry pie or of a flaky, buttery croissant, or his definition would never have remained so dispassionately matter-of-fact.

I did not grow up with much of a pastry tradition. Neither my mother nor grandmother baked. Once in a while I was treated to either a bakery prune Danish or clair but that was it. Sunday morning breakfast was a buttered bagel. My father, a cabinet maker, also provided the greater New York and New Jersey area bagel factories with wooden peels, and the fringe benefit was a weekly string of fresh bagels.

The first pie I ever attempted was cherry pie, using prepared pie filling. It was during Thanksgiving break of my freshman year at the University of Vermont. I had just learned the basic techniques of pie making in class and wanted to please and surprise my father. It turned out that everyone else in the family was surprised as well but in different and disagreeable ways! The oven in our city apartment had never been used except to store pots and pans. My mother, who was afraid of lighting an oven that had been dormant so long, made a long fuse from a paper towel and took me into the living room, covering her ears. A few minutes later, when the flame reached the escaping gas, there was the loud explosion she had anticipated (not to mention unnecessarily created). Minutes later, my grandmother (whose domain the kitchen actually was) came running in crying, The soap, the soap! It turned out she stored her bars of soap for dishwashing in the broiler under the oven. The soap, by then, was melted and bubbling (much to my amusement). But the worst surprise was yet to come. During the baking of the pie, the cherry juice started bubbling out of the pie and onto the floor of the oven where it started to burn and smoke. Apparently the steam vents I had carefully cut into the top crust had resealed from the thick juices of the sugared cherries.