A mother-daughter conversation on food and cooking (mostly)

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Pies and Pielets


Monday I made pie dough (after hollering about James McNair's cookbook in an earlier post I used his butter crust recipe); Tuesday I made a pumpkin pie; and today I made a mince pie using a meatless Joy of Cooking recipe. I used great restraint and didn't eat all of the mincemeat filling with a spoon; it is a wonderland of apples, raisins, lemon rind, spices, and brandy.

I love pie filling, but often leave the crust because it's too rich. I am going to work on pielets*: little individual ramekins of filling with elegant precooked pastry cutouts floated on top. I do like a bite or two of pastry if it's flaky and wonderful. Probably I could bake up the filling until it was bubbly, then put on the pre-browned pastry cookie, and heat everything together for five minutes. This is such a great idea that I'll probably become famous for it. I'll be asked to autograph pielets.


*Linguistic notes: Pie-ette is a better name, but hyphens are a pain, and it sounds like a brand name. Pielette is a problem homophone--I immediately got tangled up with pielettes and boats of pastry. Pielet is closer to piglet, so it works for me.

3 comments:

⚠️ said...

I actually read "pielet" as "piglet" at first, and wondered how my dear mother had become so damned demented.

At the moment, I'm boiling sweet potatoes for three sweet potato pies. Phenomenal. Happy Thanksgiving, Mom!

Eva said...

Good luck, Russell! Can't wait to hear about everyone's Thanksgiving.

Kris said...

James McNair's pie crust was lousy--thick and pasty. I followed his directions religiously, too. I got Susan's fat aunt's recipe, which the whole family used at one time, and will post that soon.