Humble Pie: Musings on What Lies Beneath the Crust

If baking pie is Zen, then eating it is nirvana

USA Today, Final Word by Craig Wilson

I am not a baker. I'm an eater. To me, it makes perfect sense. Although bakers will say I'm missing out on the Zen of it all, I still believe I'm getting the better end of the bargain.

Why spend time in the kitchen when you can just walk in, sit down, pick up a fork and reap the benefits of their work? (Related chat: Prattle on about pie with Craig, 1 p.m. ET Thursday)

I'm more than happy to make a pie maker smile, for instance. I will gladly eat what is put before me. And I rarely complain, unless the slice is too small.

Which brings me to Anne Dimock, a writer in Afton, Minn., whose new book is Humble Pie: Musings on What Lies Beneath the Crust (Andrews McMeel, $12.95).

I have never met Anne Dimock, but I am in love with her. She is wise beyond her years, whatever they may be.

Garrison Keillor calls her "the Proust of pie." Maybe she is. All I know is Dimock knows her way around a pie tin.

I kept reading the pie-making treatise, thinking sooner or later that she would go off on some wacko tangent, forcing me to lay down the book and shake my head in dismay. She never does. She is pure.

She even knows not to mix strawberries with rhubarb, a disturbing development I wrote about a few years ago.

"I have been called to rhubarb," Dimock confesses.

I have found my soul mate. The search is over.

I already have a partner, and I suspect someone saw a very good thing and snatched up Dimock long ago, but I think the two of us could have a very nice life together. I'd even move to Minnesota.

We could make beautiful pies together. Or she could make beautiful pies, and I could eat them.

I eat cake on occasion, but compared with pie, cake seems just a bit too full of itself. And then there's always that troublesome issue of frosting. Many a wedding has been ruined by frosting.

If only newlyweds started their life together with a tart little rhubarb pie. Now there's a perfect beginning.

Dimock's book also has perfect timing. It arrives at apple season. She knows that unlike a rose, an apple is not an apple is not an apple.

She rightly lambastes the ubiquitous Delicious variety — "incorrectly named" ? and muses about those long-gone days when dozens of varieties of apples were available to the pie maker. No longer, alas.

Having grown up on an apple farm in upstate New York, I know a few things about apples.

I remember those crisp autumn days when my grandmother, my aunt and my mother would await just-the-right varieties to be brought up to the house. Just-the-right apples for their pies. Northern Spy. Jonathans. Macouns.

Dimock even knows that the McIntosh, though not hard or crisp enough for a "hold-a-slice" apple pie, still sets the standard in the apple world, with Cortland a close runner-up. Such wisdom. Where has this woman been all my life?

I'm not going to beg. Marry me, Anne Dimock. I have pie tins.

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