KC 299 – Pie, Pie, Pie
Why hello there! And welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we make fun, fuck up, and have fun. I’m your bumbling band-leader, Jon O’Guin, and today’s post is covering a lot of ground in not a lot of time, so forgive me if we tumble over the introductions and get straight to the three rings of our circus: today, we’re making three different pies, all fairly simple, two classics of the O’Guin clan, one a brave new frontier. If you want to skip the details and get to the pith of the pie, click here. For everyone else, cut a slice and let’s dig in.
Easy as Eating Pie
I’m certain I’ve explained that THAT is the actual supposed root of “easy as pie”. But again, lot of ground to cover, not a lot of time. I think. Full disclosure: I am, as I mentioned last week, working in Leavenworth at the minute, and Sunday, one of my two days off, ended up particularly packed with non-paying productions: I got a flu shot, my family came to visit/drop off things I forgot at home, I played a two games of a hyper-violent version of Rugby as part of a social group I’m a part of.
While my Undead were (ironically) overpowered by the pugnacious Halflings, I did get some satisfaction in killing one of their Tree-men.
None of that sentence was false.
All of which is to say that…I’ve done next to no research on these pies, or, really, pies in general for the post. Because of the lack of time, yes, but also because of…the unexpected emotional weight of trying to care. By which I mean…you wanna know what one of my favorite foods is? A dish I turn to in times of stress, or illness? Badly made Top Ramen. “Oriental” Flavor, or Beef, by preference. Specifically, the instructions for making Top Ramen are to just dump the noodles in some boiling water, stir for 3-4 minutes, add soup mix, stir to dissolve, pour in bowl. My version is even lazier: I like putting my noodles in the bowl, sprinkling over the soup mix, and then pouring in boiling water, and eating the noodles before they’ve fully absorbed the water, where one end is like, ¾ cooked, and the other end is still basically raw. Ramen with crunchy bits. It’s super easy and fast, and it’s also insane to consider trying to find any kind of history of it: It’s me doing a minor riff on a mass-produced food.
In the same way, all of today’s pies are no-bake. They’re based on very common, simple ideas of pies. Two of them are BASICALLY THE SAME PIE, except for 2 important ingredients. They’re stuff my family makes every year. They are…not boring, to me, but as normal a part of the winter season as frost and snow and being harassed to make a list no one reads. And on top of that, the…intellectual shape of the pies makes it hard to be invested in them. This is one of those “the best map of the land is the land itself” situations (ie, “it’s easier to show than explain”, so let’s jump in to explain the first pie, Cherry Delight.
What Sweet and White and Red All Over
If you’ve never heard of Cherry Delight before, it’s rude to lie. Cherry Delight is such a common turn of phrase there are horror artists named after it. People title their family memoirs after it. It’s a phrase that somehow predates the introduction of cherries to England, by somehow the least and most likely individual imaginable, Henry the VIII.
A man with a known fascination with cherries.
That was a real fact about cherries, though not about Cherry Delight. Cherry delight is a no-bake pie/bar-thing recipe that I can find no originating material for. Again, I’ve only put in like, 10 minutes of research at this point, but this is a great example so far of a “data void”. If you search “cherry delight” there are 5+ pages of various recipes. If you search “cherry delight history”, you get results like “do you mean Joe Cherry’s memoir” or “this new horror album” mentioned above within the first two pages. The ONLY sense of a vague timeline I’ve gotten is one woman in 2017 says she’s been making it for at least 50 years, and someone else calls it “very 70’s”. Meaning it’s almost certainly connected with the redistribution of culinary industrialization in post-war America we’ve talked about before, which makes sense, because the recipe is like, 80% pre-made. You mix cream cheese, Cool Whip/Dream Whip/whatever not-really-whipped-cream weird shit you like, and some other ingredients together, plop them in a pre-made pie, and chill into what is essentially a lazy-man’s cheesecake pie.
By the way, prepare yourself for several shots of “light tan goo in brown crusts.”
You might say “Jon, there are no cherries in that”, which is correct. Because the cherries are added to the TOP. LATER. All of the actual work of making Cherry Delight is PRE CHERRY. Regardless of this maddening detail, It is one of Nathan’s favorite annual desserts. I’ve never been a huge fan of it (I don’t particularly like cherries). So I didn’t actually eat it, and have little to say. Also, this year, the pie was made by my mother while I was asleep, so I don’t even have a fun story from its creation. Hence why I’m using it as a kind of brusque example: toss stuff in a stand mixer, or mix it in a bowl with a hand mixer, plop it in a pie shell, chill, and top. It’s not rocket science.
It’s not even baking, the science to cooking’s art, because none of this is baked.
Flavorwise…it’s basically a cheesecake with a fruit topping. That’s another reason I struggle to present these recipes. As I’ve said in other posts, they’re too polished, too smooth to grab onto. I had to root around in the backstory of Europe’s cultivation of cherries to find something worth talking about. At a certain point, explaining these recipes is like explaining SNOW: you have to experience it to understand it, and while it can be beautiful and meaningful, it can also be pedestrian.
Now let us move on to a far more important recipe: Peanut Butter Pie
Georgie Porgie, Peanutty Pie
Unlike the pedestrian nature and murky history of NATE’S favorite pie, MY favorite pie is of course of a much more broadly acceptable nature, stretching to long-forgotten antiquity. And it’s so EASY. Based entirely around one core ingredient, which might be difficult to guess.
Here’s a subtle hint.
All you need to do is combine some cream cheese and peanut butter in a stand mixer with some sugar and other ingredients, fold in some cool whip and then reintroduce the newly formed foundation of the pie to a convenient pre-made pie crust. After a brief chill to help it form structure and set-up, you top it with chocolate.
Obviously, this is basically the recipe for Cherry Delight with two ingredients changed. I TOLD YOU two of today’s recipes were basically the same. I just have more pictures of this one because I personally made it, in the 15 minutes before I had to take a phone call. Seriously, I walked upstairs at 11:45, with a a call at noon, and I was back at my computer downstairs with time to spare. The only important parts to know are “Don’t put all the cool whip in at once, or you’ll beat out (heh) all the extra lift it’s meant to provide”, and “you’ll know it’s combined enough when the peanut butter turns a lighter shade”.
More a beige than a brown.
That’s it. You then drizzle it with store-bought hot fudge topping heated in a microwave. (You can then re-chill it, if you’re not looking to do a contrast between the topping and the filling.) This year, we went buck-wild, and tried a “dark chocolate raspberry” fudge topping, instead of the normal “chocolate”.
Which is visually indistinguishable, so if you like, you can pretend we did it the “normal” way.
It’s a RICH pie, with many only being able to have one or two slices before it crushes them. Also, our local Italian place makes a version with a chocolate bottom crust, and a ganache top that is so rich, even I can’t eat it without milk, or I feel ill. (Also, I have to eat it with milk because peanut butter has a lot of oxalates in it, so if I don’t have dairy with it, I might give myself kidney stones. )
The only notable fact I found while researching this is that the Philadelphia Inquirer PISSED ME OFF. Look, I get it, you’re a local newspaper struggling to make ends meet. I am in fucking WASHINGTON. Don’t make me turn off adblock, then demand if I want to read the article, I can get it as a “bonus” if I give you my email, and when I tell you “I don’t want to do that”, say I’ve “reached my limit of free articles”. I haven’t read ANY yet, you miserly Scrooges of news.
Though in chasing down other trails, it appears there was a tavern in Williamsburg that made something similar to this pie for the last 100, maybe even 160 years or so. Though I will grouse that my source there notes the pies probably aren’t actually that old, since George Washington Carver invented peanut butter, a long-standing LIE…modern peanut butter was actually invented AFER Carver, by a man named Edison in Canada, and another man named Kellogg in America. Yeah, that’s Kellogg, the jerkin’ it dude. (If you’re unaware and now confused, Kellogg, of breakfast fame, became a prominent creator of breakfast cereals specifically because he felt Americans needed more boring, grain-based diets, to stop us from getting too excited and masturbating all the time. I’d apologize for placing that concept so close to the sweet nut butter (pies), but that’s not my fault, that’s on the weird eugenicist who invented corn flakes.)
Dr Kellogg was, in many ways, the evil opposite of Colonel Sanders.
And also, we HAVE older peanut-based recipes, and even peanut-butter adjacent ones. These were mainly more industrialized versions.
Anyhow, last pie. I need to cool off.
I scream, you scream, I need a drink.
So this year, we had an addition to the roster. That addition: Bourbon Vanilla Bean Truffle Ice Cream Pie. Does that sound complicated? Good, it was meant to. Because literally every word before “ice” was superfluous: this is just an Ice cream pie, we just happened to CHOOSE “Bourbon Vanilla Bean Truffle” flavored ice cream.
“Taking credit for the work of hard Ice-Cream-Making Swedes, eh Jon?”
Actually, the inventors of Haagen-Dazs were Polish Jews who grew up in America. They named it after a made up DANISH sounding name, as a tribute to Denmark’s (at the time believed to be) exemplary protection of their Jewish population during WW2.
The set up here is slightly different, but still pretty simple: a standard no-bake pie is based on, essentially, either forming a custard, or mixing together cream-cheese with other stuff, so that it’s semi-solid at room temperature. The first two recipes we covered today used the latter, so we’re ending with the former. This is, in essence, just Jello Pudding mix beaten with melted ice cream so it would thicken into something semi-stable at room temp.
One final beige for the road.
And I have to confess: this recipe is so simple, I was physically present when we made it, and I completely forgot. I was SHOCKED to discover I had taken pictures of the process. The result is similarly confusing: the pudding mix chosen for the mission was simple Vanilla, so I assumed we’d get a mostly bland vanilla pie. But there was a surprising amount of, for lack of a better word, “darkness” from the bourbon. By which I mean, for a combination of melted ice cream and pudding mix, this wasn’t as sweet as I thought it was going to be, which I have to attribute to the kind of burnt sugar-taste of bourbon undercutting it. I had two pieces of the pie. It wasn’t like, mind-blowing, but it was decent, and interesting in terms of flavors. Interesting story about this one: apparently, sometimes my mother used it as a replacement version of Cherry Delight: she’d mix vanilla Ice cream and Cheesecake pudding mix, and then top with the Cherry filling. So technically, I’ve really just told you the basically the same recipe twice, in two different ways.
And that’s three pies. All very simple, two with a long history on O’Guin holiday dessert tables, all probably achievable with $10 and 10 minutes in your own home. So if you think you’ve got the space on your holiday table, give them a try. The Ice cream one, for all that I didn’t get a final picture, has the most promise for alteration. There’s TONS of ice cream flavors and Jello Pudding flavors you can riff with. Find something that works for you.
THURSDAY/FRIDAY: I THINK THINGS ARE GOING TO GET A LITTLE CHEESY. THINK OF IT AS THE ADVENT OF A NEW AGE.
MONDAY: A GIANT TUBE OF MEAT, CUT INTO SLABS. A PRIME EXAMPLE OF O’GUIN HOLIDAY COOKING, IN HONOR OF OUR 300TH POST.
And now, the
Recipes
All will make 1 pie. Do with it what you will.
Cherry Delight
Ingredients
Pre-made Graham cracker pie crust* (if you want to make a bar version, you can make your own crust by crushing 20 graham cracker into crumbs, and tossing them with ½ cup sugar, and ¼ cup melted butter, and baking in a 9x13 pan for 8 minutes at 350.)
1 (8oz) serving of Cool Whip, Dream Whip, or Whipped cream
1 8 oz package of cream cheese
½ cup powdered sugar
1 can cherry pie filling
Preparation
Cream together cream cheese and sugar. Fold in whipping agent. Pour over crust.
Chill at least one hour, pouring cherry pie filling over before service.
Peanut Butter Pie
Ingredients
1 c creamy peanut butter
8 oz package of cream cheese, softened
1 cup sugar
2 tbsp margarine
1 (8 oz) tub of Cool Whip* (You could also make your own whipped cream with 8 oz of heavy cream, 1 tbsp vanilla, and 2 Tbsp sugar)
1 “extra serving” pre-made graham cracker crust
Hot fudge topping….for topping
Preparation
Combine all ingredients before Cool Whip in a bowl or stand mixer, beating until creamed. Fold in Cool Whip/whipped cream, until mixture has lightened, and few to no visible streaks of cream remain.
Pour into crust, level out with an offset spatula, and chill at least one hour. Heat topping, and drizzle over before service (or prior to chilling).
Ice Cream Pie
Ingredients
2 cups softened ice cream
1 c milk
2 packages (3 ¾ oz each) instant pudding mix
Premade graham cracker crust
Preparation
Mix ice cream, milk, and pudding mix in a bowl until fully combined. Pour into pie crust, and chill for at least one hour. Serve.
