Crisp or Pie?

I feel as though at some point, a person makes a decision that determines the course of their holiday feasts and dinner party desserts for years to come. The decision comes down to this: am I a pie person or a crisp person? I always assumed I would be a pie person. My mother is a pie person and I grew up watching her cut the butter into the flour, drizzle in the cold water as she tossed the buttery flour to delicately dampen it, then strew the wooden island with more flour before rolling out her crust. I made my first apple pie in my mother’s kitchen, with her at my side coaching me on when to stop mixing the crust so that it didn’t get overworked and tough. My mother always cut simple little designs out of the top crust –cute, practical steam vents. She would sprinkle the top of the unbaked pie with sugar so that when it came out of the oven it had a sparkled goldenness. I always thought my mother’s pies were the best part of any evening, and I wanted to be able to make them as well. And for years I tried. My pies were fine. Good, even. But I never felt the connection with them that it seemed my mother did with hers, and my pies never graduated from good to sublime.

After I moved to New York, I started cooking a lot with my friend Kara. Kara is a crisp person. Whereas my mother takes her time, measures carefully, and would rather err on the side of under seasoning rather than over seasoning, Kara dives into her cooking with the assumption that if she screws something up, she can fix it. She rarely measures anything with actual measuring spoons, preferring to eyeball the ingredients as they go into a bowl. She looks at a recipe to get the general idea of what it needs, and then usually doesn’t look at it again. This method of cooking doesn’t always pan out, but with a crisp, it works great because no delicacy is required. No amount of pampering is going to turn a crisp into anything more than a rustic, ugly duckling of the dessert world. The combination of fruit, flour, butter, and sugar is always going to taste good, and without the pressure of making a beautiful dessert, it is easier to have fun with what is being created. There’s an element of adventure to this way of cooking that gives me a bit of a buzz.

Recently, I decided to take a rhubarb crisp to a cookout, figuring that after all the burgers, hotdogs and chips had been eaten, a tangy fruit dessert would be welcomed. Plus, I had just gotten a pound of rhubarb from the farmer’s market and couldn’t wait for my first rhubarb dessert of the season. Once my rhubarb was in the pie plate, I realized that I needed more fruit, so I added a bag of frozen strawberries, and for good measure, one granny smith apple. I sprinkled the fruit with a couple teaspoons of sugar, and then started preparing the topping. After combining a cup each of rolled oats, flour, and brown sugar, I melted about a stick of butter, and stirred that into the dry ingredients along with a dash or two of salt, tasting small pinches of the mixture to determine whether more sugar was needed. Because I like the zing of orange, I added a spoonful of frozen orange juice concentrate to the topping. Once the topping stuck together in clumps, but wasn’t mushy with dampness and I was happy with the sweetness level, I piled it onto the fruit in the pie plate. After cooking for about 45 minutes at 350 degrees, it came out bubbling and slightly browned on the top. At the cookout, I watched as everyone spooned the dessert onto their plates, satisfied with my status as a crisp person and dreaming about the peach, blueberry, and blackberry possibilities still to come.