Ann Leckie

Y’all. This pie. There’s just…it’s…I mean…

Look at the recipe. I mean, really look at it. It calls for a cup of double strength tea, okay. So far so good. Two cups of sugar.

You know that super sweet custard, for the Rum Cream pie? It took one whole cup of sugar. Right. On with today’s recipe.

Which calls for eleven egg yolks. Criminey, why not just round it out at a dozen, huh? Also, I’m going to tell you that the instructions to “whisk” eleven egg yolks together with two cups of sugar are to laugh. That does not whisk. It does better when you add the tea and the lemon juice, of course, and then you get to the real WTF moment of this recipe, where you put this in a double boiler and proceed to melt two and a half sticks of butter into it.

For those of you not in the US, or not into cooking, butter here is generally sold in 1lb packages of four individually wrapped sticks. Two sticks of butter is a half pound of butter.

In one pie.

Then you pour it, the recipe says, into a crust you’ve put in a ten inch pie pan. What they don’t tell you is, it had better be a ten inch deep dish pie pan. If you decide for whatever reason that you have some sort of urgent emotional or perhaps biological need to make this pie, I strongly advise you to purchase and have ready two deep dish pie shells. I had pulled out a regular one and discovered it didn’t even hold half of the filling. Fortunately, our love for pumpkin pie here at the Leckie household, and the convenience of quiche as a fairly easily made wintertime supper that might even use up some leftovers, means I nearly always have frozen deep dish pie shells in inventory. So I have one veeeeery full deep dish and one veeeery full regular.

I’ve got nothing against deep dish pie, by the way. I just would have liked to have known in advance that this was going to be one.

That’s the “regular” pie shell, and you can see that it’s probably a bit overbaked. Not that it makes much of a difference generally. This came out rather like a pecan pie, without the pecans, but with a lemony edge to it. Or actually, what it really reminds me of is butter tarts, which I generally make without raisins or anything. I haven’t made those for ages! And butter tarts might be an appropriate Ancillary pie, hmm.

Anyway. In what appears to be a general theme with these recipes, I could not taste any tea whatever. If I made this again, I would probably try using super-strong concentrated tea to see if any of it would actually come through. As it is, well, I love pecan pie. I am trying not to think about just how much butter is in even the small slice I just tasted.

I probably won’t make this again–well, I might make it for the Missouri State Sacred Harp Convention, which involves a pot luck both days and this sort of dessert is an essential part of the experience. But it’s not the sort of thing you just up and make on a whim.

I didn’t think it had any potential to be a suitable Ancillary Sword pie, honestly, but really once I saw the recipe I had to do it. You know, for Science.

Oh, and I don’t have a picture of the deep dish one, because I took it to the regular local Sacred Harp singing and that was the end of that. So, yeah, I’ll probably make it for the convention.