Can She Make a Cherry Pie?

When I was in graduate school, and potluck get-togethers were frequent, a woman who spent summers in Maine showed up at some event one evening with a cherry pie. I was organizing the food, and when she handed me the pie, she said, "It's sour cherry. Have you ever had one?" I hadn't, and I didn't tell her that I had been thinking: Cherry pie. Yuck. In my very limited experience with them, at diners and fast food joints, cherry pies were filled with gloppy, sickly-sweet, barely recognizable cherries that were swimming in corn syrup and stained my tongue with dye. Intrigued by the notion of a fruit I had never tasted, I took a slice. She watched with a knowing expression. I have never looked back.

I am not a dessert person. I will almost always choose savory over sweet, and when it comes to pie--not a favorite--I have always focused on the crust, finding the fillings insipid or mushy or both, with the exception of my own pecan pie, which I have tweaked by eliminating most of the sugar. But a sour cherry pie, made well! It is a thing of beauty and a joy for, well, about 24 hours, which is as long as they last in my house, thanks mostly to me.

A sour cherry pie, in a crust made with rendered lard, the way my great-grandmother must have made it, is perhaps my favorite dessert; it certainly elevates the pie to heights unimaginable by those who use a can opener to start their recipe. After I tasted that first sour cherry pie, I grilled its baker. She told me that sour cherries were very hard to find, which proved to be true. She picked hers in a friend's private orchard and froze them so she could make a few pies a year. She told me they grew mostly in the midwest and could be mail-ordered but were considered old-fashioned by even gourmet markets, which almost never carried them. I tried anyway.

To be continued...