Blueberry Pie with Bourbon Ice Cream

Actually, this post is mostly just an excuse to display this mouth-watering photograph of the blueberry pie I made the other day. It's all golden brown and rumply. Unfortunately, I got a late start on it, so I didn't have time to let it cool all the way, and the filling was less like a jam and more like a ... hot, runny jam. Look, it's hard to make it taste bad when you mix blueberries, sugar and cinnamon, wrap them in pate brisée, and bake.

I found the blueberry pie recipe on WilliamsSonoma.com, and as always I modified it a little, in my case because I forgot to dot the blueberry mixture with butter before putting on the top crust. I didn't notice the lack of it, and while it seems a bit hypocritical to tout a pie as low fat—I'm not going to be hypocritical. But why add needless butter?

The crust here is Martha Stewart's pate brisée. Pie crust dough is so easy to make in advance and I made it the day before and stuck it in the refrigerator.

I grew up cutting Crisco into flour with a pair of knives, and I salute anyone who still wants to make pie crust that way. My mother was also a believer (this works particularly well with biscuits) in the pastry cutter, that horseshoe-shaped five-wire with a wooden handle. I have such vivid memories of tossing flour around the bowl with the pastry cutter. Mamacita's words of wisdom about pastry dough: handle it as little as possible. As a thoroughly modern girl, I have been seduced by the promise of the food processor as the most dispassionate, cold, impartial and bloodless cutter of fats into flours. (I often think of Frank Mentesana, who said of the food processor: "Drag it out and keep it out." Mine lives right on my counter.)

Martha's Pate Brisee

2 1/2 cups flour

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. sugar

14 Tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4" slices

2 Tablespoons vegetable shortening, such as Crisco, chilled

1/4-1/2 cup ice water

Contrary to the big talk of the food establishment (dare I call them "the food elite"? even, the "coastal food elite"? even, "the elites"?), this is not rocket science. The idea is that once your pastry is cooked you want the flour to form little layers that crumble into yummy flakelets in your mouth. This is accomplished by combining the flour and butter just enough but not too much—you want to kind of get it to Balkanize into chunks of butterflour which will then be held together on a larger scale with water. I don't want to push my Balkan analogy too far, but in some ways pie crust is like Yugoslavia, with you, the cook, as Josef Tito, holding together the disparate provinces. Tito did this through intimidation and violence, with which we do not hold, here at Clark and Scribe. We will use water, source of life.

Anyway, let's lay it right out on the table. I am far too lazy to cut the butter into teeny tiny pieces like everyone tells you to. Just slice it into 1/4" slices and you are good to go. Place the flour, salt and sugar in the bowl of your food processor. Pulse to blend. Drop in the butter slices and shortening, hopefully getting each piece coated with flour. Pulse until the fat has been integrated into the flour and the mixture looks like ... Martha says "coarse meal" ... little chunks of butterflour. This doesn't take long: probably about 15 seconds. The butterflour doesn't really hold together, but resembles bread crumbs. What you definitely don't want is for it to become a hunk of dough—that comes later—so pulse a few times and check, pulse and check. Once it resembles "coarse meal", start to add the ice water a few drops at a time, until the whole thing comes together and is definitely a dough. Turn it out onto a cutting board, form it into two balls, press the balls into rounds, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate. You will need both rounds for this recipe, but pie crust dough can also be frozen if you don't need it right away. Thaw it overnight in the fridge the night before you plan to cook with it.

Butterless (Ha Ha) Blueberry Pie

When I was growing up, we spent the summers in Maine, near my dad's mother. We had this wonderful, odd, super-modern house that was all windows in the middle of the woods with a lot of bedrooms and a sofa bed and my parents' friends used to come up from New York to visit. Between these visits, Mother, Steph and I would cook and cook, and one of the things we used to make was blueberry pie with Maine blueberries. We would make the pies in advance and freeze them unbaked, and then when the guests came Mother would whip out these gorgeous homemade pies and pop them into the oven. Yum.

I also remember there was one island in Casco Bay where we used to go on the dory my grandfather built back in the '50s when he first moved to Maine from Illinois. The island was one of those low, flat Maine islands where the beach was made of all huge flat grey rocks all at angles to one another, like giants' playthings, and the whole top of the island was blueberry bushes that grew the tiniest, sweetest blueberries, far too small for giants but exactly the right size for little girls. They were so small it was hard to pick enough for a pie, especially since a lot of them got lost on the way to the bag and, oops, ended up in my mouth.

I hope I've mentioned that you should only cook with fruit that's in season. Otherwise you have to drown it in sugar, and I love sugar, but who needs drowned fruit. If you want to eat sugar and fruit, eat jam. More on jam later.

4 cups fresh blueberries, washed and picked over

1 Tbs. fresh lemon juice

3/4 cup sugar

3 Tbs. cornstarch

1/2 tsp. lemon zest

1/4 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon

Roll out one round of dough on a floured surface, fold in half and unfold in a 9" pie plate. Press to get it into the edges of the pan. If you are super Type A, you can use a pair of scissors to trim the edges to a 3/4" overhang. Set the pie plate in the fridge.

Place the blueberries in a large bowl, sprinkle with the lemon juice and toss to coat evenly. In a small bowl, stir together sugar, cornstarch, lemon zest, salt and cinnamon. Sprinkle the sugar mixture over the berries and toss to distribute evenly. Immediately transfer to the dough-lined pan and return it to the fridge.

Roll out the second round of dough and place it over the filled pie. Trim the edges so that there is 1" of overhang, then fold the edge of the top round over the edge of the bottom round and crimp to seal. (Use your knuckles to create a ruffle around the edge, if you like: the index and middle knuckles of your right hand go underneath the edge of the crust and then you press lightly down between them with the knuckle of your left index finger.) Use a knife to cut holes in the top crust so that steam can escape during baking. Place pie in refrigerator.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Bake pie until crust is golden and the filling is thick and bubbling, about 50 to 60 minutes. Remove to a wire rack and allow to cool completely—1 to 2 hours. If you like, rewarm in a 350 degree oven for 10-15 minutes before serving.

Serve with ...

Bourbon Ice Cream

This one is really easy. It was Steph's idea originally, after he took a sip of bourbon and a bite of vanilla ice cream.

Combine 2 cups heavy cream, 2 cups milk, and 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar, depending on taste. Stir until sugar dissolves. Add 1/4 cup bourbon (I use Jim Beam). Freeze in ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions. Employ self control.