Thanksgiving is the best of all holidays, marrying the festivity of Christmas with the patriotic spirit of July Fourth. Also, Thanksgiving is the premier celebration of my favorite food in the world: the American pie. I love it so much that I start celebrating weeks early, carefully rolling out my pie crusts and freezing them so I can pop them into the oven on the morning of the Big Day.
Four years ago, I wrote a long essay lamenting the decline of a dish that was once so fundamental to our tables that it spawned the phrase “As American as apple pie.” These days, if we haven’t gone low-carb, we’re more likely to bring out cake, brownies or ice cream than a good old-fashioned pie. But at Thanksgiving, it still retains pride of place, even if some despicable quislings have defected to pumpkin cheesecake.
The pie, like many fine traditions, was a victim of technological change. For centuries, it was undemanding compared with other desserts — hence the saying “As easy as pie.” A brownie needed expensive chocolate; a cake required exact proportions of ingredients and a great deal of muscle to cream butter and sugar by hand or whip egg whites into a leavening foam. A pie needed minimal ingredients: salt, flour, water and fat. You could throw a crust together in a few minutes, roll it out and fill it with practically anything you had on hand, in whatever amounts you had available.
A century of rising incomes, global supply chains and technological change upended those calculations. Today, even a novice can make a cheap and reliably excellent cake from scratch in under 20 minutes thanks to innovations such as commercial baking powder, standardized measures and electric mixers. Good pie crust is comparatively fiddly and uncertain. Add too little water, and it won’t hold together; add too much, and the gluten in your flour will become overexcited, giving your pie crust the consistency of well-used cardboard. Then there’s rolling the thing out, which is a whole other adventure.
All this takes skill and experience, and those talents atrophied as more people took the easy way out. This Thanksgiving, many cooks will use a listless store-bought crust or buy a bakery pie that will have begun to stale before it is served. It’s a vicious cycle: The less often people make pie crust, the less ability they have to make them, and the less reason they have to do so, because at this point, many Americans have never had a gloriously tender, sublimely flaky homemade pie crust. They don’t know what they’re missing.
My last two columns have been about romanticizing the past and the impossibility of recapturing some imagined golden age. But while nostalgia politics is a dead end, nostalgia itself is not. We should rue the good things that have been lost, pie crust among them. Better yet, we should rescue them whenever we can.
The happy ending to this story is that technological change has made pie crust easier — not as easy as cake, maybe, but still something a competent beginner can master with a small amount of effort. Food processors simplify the laborious process of cutting fat into flour, and chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has developed not one but two foolproof pie crust recipes for novices who own such a machine. I’d encourage readers who think pies are too difficult to give one a try, roll them out (videos on the internet will show you how to do this), then put them in the freezer to await Thanksgiving morning.
But I’d also ask them to think about how technology might be used to recapture other things they miss. Childhood foods you’ve lost, for example. At the end of my father’s life, I managed to reproduce his beloved snow pudding, a now-forgotten lemon dessert that turns out to be delicious and easy to make with an electric stand mixer. Then think bigger: Could safer self-driving cars revive the once-common sight of children playing in the street? Could a productivity boom driven by artificial intelligence give us more time to invest in our communities? Could manufactured housing make it easier to form families, or might robots reverse our demographic decline by taking over the dreary housework that kids generate?
I can feel the technology skeptics chafing at such optimism — what about all the downsides of technological change we can see everywhere? Why should the next round of “progress” be any different? Fair enough; I’m not claiming that further innovation will give back some of the things technology has taken from us. I’m only suggesting that it could. Whether it does will depend on how we choose to use the next round of inventions — just as the future of American pie depends on what you and I choose to put on our table this Thanksgiving.
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