RHUBARB PIE

RHUBARB PIE

Strawberry-Rhubarb pie was on the menu for dessert this noon. While I didn’t have any, (I will have it for dinner - if there is any left), I can still recall the taste of my Mother’s delicious rhubarb pie. It is always interesting to me, how my five senses, words or events trigger my brain to recall old memories.
While living at home in Ypsilanti before WWII, our Mother would send us across Osborn Street (along side of our home at 715 Oak Street) to the “woods” to cut wild rhubarb. She would use it right away to make a pie or maybe just a sauce. Either one was a delicacy! Her flakey pie crusts would melt in my mouth. Of course she used lard as one of the ingredients. No one would dare to use this shortening- ingredient today, with all the well known cardiovascular taboos. She didn’t refer to it as “rhubarb“, she called it “pie plant.” I didn’t taste strawberry-rhubarb pie until I moved to California. Speaking of the “Woods”, Mom would also send us over to cut wild asparagus. People would not stoop to do this today, but during the Great Depression, those two items supplemented our diet. Too, they were fresh! After WWII, they chopped down all those beautiful trees, and filled the area with concrete and houses. That was “progress”, I guess.
Again, speaking of pies, my favorites are Boston crème; Key lime; chocolate crème and lemon meringue. Come to think of it, I like all pies - except raisin and mince meat.
I used to make apple pies, after I retired in 1983. I got interested in this because we had a golden delicious- apple tree behind our home in Vallejo. I also made a lot of applesauce, as did my Mother. I tried to use all those apples from our tree. The birds, and the worms helped me, but I did my part!
I read about a Clara Chalmers from Bedford, New Hampshire winning a State contest for “Best Apple Pie.” I wrote and asked her if she would share her prize winning recipe pie with me? I was ready to accept her refusal - for whatever reason. She graciously mailed me her recipe. I thought she was a pretty classy lady to share her prize-winning recipe with a stranger.(She was about 80 at the time, and I was 70). Her recipe was included in the glossy magazine she sent. We became friends, and shared phone calls, letters and Christmas cards. This correspondence went on for over ten years, even after her husband George died. It wasn’t long after that, her daughter phoned me and told me that Clara had died. Even though Clara and I never met (I have often regretted that I didn’t make the effort to go and visit them), I was very sad, and actually experienced an emotion of “Loss”. What strange ways we reach out to other people and touch their life, as well as ours. Our life-experience was that much richer for our chance “meeting.”
RCL - 11/8/09.