John Thorne and Matt Lewis Thorne live in Northampton, MA. They have published the food letter Simple Cooking for 20 years.

List of Recipes

xiii

Here

(202)

Green-Pea Pie

(3)

Maine Home Fried

(16)

Knowing Beans

(21)

Maine Baked Beans

(4)

Boston Brown Bread

(4)

First Find Your Bean Pot

(3)

Bean Hole Beans

(4)

Crab Rolls & Lobster Stew

(14)

Fix Your Hash

(14)

Spring Greens

(4)

The Call of the Wild Berry

(11)

Strawberry Sunshine Preserves

(4)

Beyond Pie: Blueberry Bread-and-Butter Pudding

(10)

The Mushroom Hunt

101

(4)

Moosehead Gingerbread

105

(7)

Dinner at Duffy's

112

(22)

Clamdiggers and Downeast Country Stores

134

(5)

Saltwater Seasonings: Good Food from Coastal Maine

139

(5)

Maine Eats

144

(7)

Down East Chowder

151

(54)

Origins

156

(3)

Son of a Sea Cook

159

(4)

A Family Tree

163

(4)

The Abhorred Tomato

167

(4)

Building a Chowder

171

(11)

Fish Chowder

182

(5)

Clam Chowder

187

(8)

Corn Chowder

195

(7)

Envoi

202

(3)

There

205

(112)

Bayou Odyssey

209

(5)

First You Make a Roux...

214

(6)

Out of the Gumbo Pot

220

(5)

Crawfish Etouffee ... and Others

225

(6)

La Cuisine Creole

231

(8)

New Orleans Remembered

236

(3)

Oysters & Herbs: A Creole Medley

239

(10)

A Note on Oysters Rockefeller

246

(3)

Gombo Zhebes

249

(6)

Cajun Dirty Rice

255

(6)

Coffee & Dessert

261

(5)

Two Creole Classics

266

(12)

...And a Note on the Cajun Spiral-Bound

274

(2)

The Cajun/Creole Films of Les Blank

276

(2)

Rice & Beans: The Itinerary of a Dish

278

(39)

The Hearth and the Cooking Pot

280

(3)

The Deep South & the Cowpea

283

(6)

Red Beans & New Orleans

289

(9)

All Mixed Up and Born on the Islands

298

(19)

Everywhere

317

(172)

Serious Pig

323

(26)

Defining It

323

(5)

Making It

328

(7)

Saucing It

335

(6)

Cooking with Wood: An Update

341

(3)

Reading about It

344

(5)

Cornbread Nation

349

(21)

Three Cornbreads

358

(7)

The Cornbread Skillet

365

(2)

The Education of a Miller

367

(3)

Sourdough Buckwheats

370

(6)

American Cheese

376

(5)

Burger Heaven

381

(4)

White Bread

385

(4)

The Toll House Cookie

389

(4)

A Cup of Coffee

393

(4)

The Recipe Detective

397

(5)

Amid the Alien Corn

402

(9)

Walking the Wild Side

411

(4)

Italian-American

415

(7)

Road Food

422

(9)

Roadside Magazine

429

(2)

Shaker Your Plate

431

(19)

Some Shaker Recipes

447

(3)

Just Another Bowl of Texas Red

450

(39)

Buffalo Hunter

452

(3)

S.O.B.

455

(4)

The Urban Cowboy---1896

459

(3)

The Joint

462

(3)

The Makings

465

(6)

Benchmark Chili

471

(11)

The Seared & the Stewed

482

(7)

Bibliography

489

(10)

Index

499

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

Chapter One

Here

The cottage--for that, despite its lack of quaintness, is what it is--lies tucked into the side of a hill, just below the road into town and above a small cove, where the water glistens through a stand of trees. The walls have been insulated, a modern bathroom has been installed, as has electric heat to help out the woodstove when winter pulls its worst. Still, without a doubt, it is a summer place.

You know this immediately. It has the air of vulnerability always present in the sort of Maine house that is too airy, too full of light to have been built for living in all year round. There are other hints, too, especially in the motley mix of splurge and meanness that is the one feature common to almost any summer house: the neatly painted wood floors and the real pine paneling on the one hand; on the other, salvaged from older houses, the conspicuously mismatched doors and window frames.

These have their charm. Not so the kitchen, which sits in an addition tacked onto the back of the house by a later owner when the cottage was remade into a year-round rental property. This room has its amenities--lots of space, good light, plenty of counters, a decent sink. Against these must be weighed walls covered by fiberboard embossed in fake pine, a dropped ceiling of greasy Styrofoam, cabinets crudely hammered out of cheap plywood and shellacked to a repellent gloss.

The floor is covered with a casually laid roll of linoleum that has begun to split in long, curling cracks where the addition meets the house, for that part of the room rises when the ground freezes and comes down when it thaws. The refrigerator, turned as low as the knob will go, still ices up lettuce in the vegetable bin. Two of the burners on the electric range will barely work--the other two, as with most electric ranges, work only too well.

Worst of all, this is a real Maine kitchen. The slapdash standards of construction actually reinforce its just-us-folks sense of coziness that is the vernacular Maine counterbalance to winter ... and to cold. That was what flashed into my mind the moment I first stepped inside. I hardly noticed the fake paneling, the torn linoleum, the crummy ceiling. Instead, I had a sudden vision of the previous occupant--an Israeli boat designer, as it happened--pulling open the battered aluminum storm door (a plywood square already replaced the lower wind-shattered pane of glass) on a bitter January night, stamping his feet and blowing on his fingers as he tugged it shut against the ice-edged darkness pushing in behind. A shiver ran up my spine.

I had come back to Maine to live in a summer cottage, because for me a Maine summer cottage was home. I had chosen Castine because it was almost an island, on the tip of a peninsula, out of the relentless up-and-down traffic of the highways that now sunder most Maine seacoast towns. At once patrician, historic, and picturesque, it was hardly free of summer folk--they came in droves. The difference was that most of them arrived by yacht. There were no motels on the outskirts of Castine, no fast-food places at its center. As full of traffic as it might be on a summer Sunday, you could walk the streets at nightfall from one dim streetlight to the next in total quiet, smelling the green sweat of the trees and watching the night float through the shoals of stars.

Sentimental? Well, right then I wanted to roll in sentimental. The first night I slept there I awoke at some early hour and heard an owl softly hooting as it flew by outside. The next morning I found roses blossoming in hedges all over town and wild swamp iris blooming in roadside gutters. I remember how purely happy I was those first few weeks, how often I kept thinking, Why have I waited so long?

I had first thought about what coming home might mean ten years before, when I moved into the upstairs apartment in my grandparents' house. I had come to keep an eye on my grandfather--my grandmother had died and he himself was failing--but it gave me the opportunity to return to the very place my mother brought me back to after I was born, to wait for my father to come back from the Second World War.

Instead, as it turned out, he made the army his career, and we went to him . I was tour when my mother, my new baby brother, and I took the train to Texas. From there we went on to many other houses in many other places. Some of these I remember better than others, but not one of them gave me a lasting sense of home.

Consequently, just as children forced to grow up with strangers learn to read adults with preternatural care, so have I come to read houses. Childhood memories, when summoned, arrive in the form of snapshots, a catalogue of unconnected favorite parts: the sharp twist of a staircase, the glint of a bath knob, the bright compactness of a butler's pantry, the dim, moonface glow of a radio dial on a bedside table.

There were two exceptions. One was my grandparents' house: a two-storied, dark-green shingled monster with a wide front porch, a basement made of granite blocks, an enormous, empty attic, and a second floor that my grandparents had turned into two one-bedroom apartments, which, when family wasn't staying in one or the other, they rented out.

Thirty years later, the one my mother and I had lived in together was nearly unchanged, right down to the electrical fixtures. The walls were papered with the same bland flowery chintz; the woodwork was stained the same dark oak; the same double sink--the deep side for hand washing clothes--waited in the kitchen ... as did the same secondhand Magic Chef stove that my mother, pregnant with me, had helped my grandfather carry up the stairs.

I had left when I was four, but flashes of memory came back to me as I settled in at thirty-five. Looking out the same bedroom window at the soft summer evening light on the roofs across the street, I become again the restless three-year-old who was sent to bed with the day still bright outside.

Even so, I remain astonished at the smallness of the place; it had been so large before. This sense of seeing everything through a reversed telescope never entirely went away, and sometimes I would lie down on the floor, just to make it fall back in place.

If I had a home at all, I thought, this was it. Instead, I had only returned for one last visit. It was my grandparents' house, not mine--as I would discover during the year of caretaking after my grandfather died, which he did just four years after I moved in. Soon after the estate was settled and the house sold, I came to Maine.

As some readers will already know, since, without my intending (or, until now, even noticing) this, it is the subject of the first chapter of each one of my three books--my grandparents had also owned a house there, a summer cottage, built at the edge of a cliff on an island in Casco Bay. When I was growing up, more summers than not, my father drove us--my mother, two brothers, a sister, and me--from wherever in the country we then lived to spend the summer there.

It was the one place in the world that I loved purely--by which I mean that it seemed to me so perfect that I craved it in all its parts. It haunts my memory the way certain childhood books do--the ones from which any random phrase can summon from deep memory a luminous wash that combines the sound of the parent's reading voice with the sight, feel, even smell of the actual page. This cottage is the place, were that possible, I would want to claim as home.

Except I can't. It's gone. When my grandfather died it went to an uncle, who renovated it out of recognition ... or, rather, into something very much like the cottage I was now renting in Castine. Although even to write this fills me with bitter sadness, I don't blame my uncle (in any case, he is now also dead). He loved the cottage; his way of expressing that love was to fix it up. He rewired it, insulated it, installed a real bathroom, walled in the screened porch ... and, somewhere along the line, he killed it. The last time I was there, it felt, it looked, like any other house.

A summer cottage, by definition, is only marginally a house and can never be a home; it is too long left empty for that. A proper home is drenched with the presence of the people who live in it even when they are away; enter it then and you feel an intruder, a violator of a private world. Go into a summer place left vacant for the winter and it leaps to welcome you with the impartial affection of a homeless dog. Pet me, it says, feed me; I'm yours.

Even the best-kempt summer house has this hunger for affection, this hint of bone against the skin. A true summer cottage must be left empty three seasons of the year if it is to remain permeable to the one season we want to let inside. In summer, in cottage as in clothing, the thinner the membrane we drape around us, the greater the pleasure in inhabiting it. We want the lawn to roll right up to the front door stoop, the fresh air to pour in through wide-open windows, the rain to be just that close as it slides past us off the roof.

A home radiates a comforting certainty not only because of its solidity but because it is defined by a series of near-inalterable rules, which, in a summer house, are in constant violation. My mother also called the place "the camp," which gets it right. We went there to camp out, no matter the walls, roof, doors, and windows. Not only did outside and inside get pleasantly confused, so did public and private, adult and child--all familiar orderings rendered magically contingent. Each and every summer day, it seems--especially to a child--the world has the chance of being made over fresh and new.

In our cottage we went to bed, not to a bedroom, but out on the front porch, to crawl under thick quilts and listen to the waves rustle, to the wind toss through the trees. On stormy nights, we climbed up the narrow stair ladder by the fireplace to the attic and the old horsehair mattress laid out on its floor. There, we breathed mysteriously ancient air and shone our flashlights on the things that pushed out from the shadows: old boots, chamber pots, coffee cans full of nails, piles of gramophone records. The rain pattered on the shingles over our heads and ran splashing into the rain barrels set into the wall beside us. The next day, we washed our faces with it out of a basin in the side yard, drying ourselves with the morning sun.

Here was a world a child could understand: the rain water collected in a barrel; the drinking water was hauled up in a bucket from a well. When we were cold we made a fire in the fireplace, and for a long time, when it was dark, we lit candles and kerosene lanterns ... and carried one with us to the outhouse. We brought big chunks of ice for the icebox up from the dock in a wheelbarrow. We dug clams and picked berries and roasted hot dogs on sticks over a fire at the shore.

This was a life, it goes without saying, that was far from self-sufficiency--but one very close to self-revelation. Here was a world made tangible to the senses, one whose flesh seemed as fragile as our own. It is a small thing, maybe, to lie snug and safe, listening to the cold wet night pawing at the wall beside your ear. An experience complexly sensuous and sad, it gives substance to our understanding of safety, warmth, and comfort. Today, only the summer cottage has walls thin enough for the outside to reach us at all.

This is why I came back as a young man to spend my summers on the island: to lie in bed and listen to rain fall on the roof. I came to have fires in the fireplace and to cook for myself in the tiny camp kitchen. Shake the home-ec associations out of "homemaking" and it almost describes my apparently paradoxical mission: to make a home in a house that could never really be one.

This, though, was the point. Just as some people feel most at home in a sailboat cabin or a hunting shack, what I needed was a house hungry for company--a hunger physically embodied in the fireplace. Built by my grandfather when my mother and her brothers were children out of enormous stones that they dragged up from the beach, it was a hulking monster that sat in the center of the cottage and dominated all its rooms.

Maine island summers are full of rainy days and chilly evenings, of time spent sitting, reading, talking, eating, playing cards or board games--all of it done in front of the fire. A fireplace generates a sense of companionship not only because it casts off heat but because it is a presence in the room. You feed a fire, you clean up after it, and always, you keep an eye on it. In an ordinary house, "inside" is defined by absence: a pervasive, padded silence, itself drowned out by the television or the CD player's unctuous purr. Reality is neutered, like an unsexed, declawed pet. In a house warmed by fire, "inside" has a living edge. It is not entirely subservient to you.

Fire making was also the end of a whole series of related activities which connected me to this place: finding driftwood, rowing it home, cutting it into lengths, splitting it into logs, and stacking them in the woodbox under the stairs. All in all, I spent more time feeding the house than I ever spent feeding myself, because feeding it was what excited and pleased me. Like a child giving a carrot to a horse, I adored being, for that moment, the sole conduit of its needs--not a visitor or an owner, but a friend.

So I expected, when I came back to Maine to live, to reacquaint myself with wood. What I hadn't expected was to be thrown back into a Maine kitchen. When we think about the particulars that define "place," we usually see this in terms of bonuses: Maine equals lobsters, blueberries, fiddleheads, and soft-shell clams. But just as the best wines can come from vines planted in hardscrabble hillside plots, so can the limits of a particular kitchen, the cook's own microclimate, do more to shape our cooking than any other thing. And Maine, like nowhere else, is a place of hardscrabble kitchens.

The camp cottage kitchen was one kind, the one in Castine another. The camp kitchen was dark, dank, and cramped. Eight feet square, it was illuminated by a solitary wall fixture set over the stove. Any cooking task away from the frying pan was done in shadow. The single tap spilled a weak flow of rainwater that always had to be rationed and could never be drunk, as its faint and slightly sweet smell of sun-baked algae warned. A bucket of well water sat, a dipper by its side, on a special shelf beside the door. The stove's burners spluttered weakly and coated the pots with soot.

I haven't been there for a decade and I can still smell the thin, sharp stink of the propane gas and the sour, weedy smell of damp plywood; feel the pitted, black-encrusted bottoms of the huge aluminum frying pans; hear the acidulous hiss of water droplets vaporizing on the giant kettle as it heated the dishwater. I can see the pig-shaped wooden cutting board; the huge green tin breadbox holding a half-empty, wax-paper packet of tired saltines; the kitchen shelf with its frilly-edged shelf paper and the row of soup cans on whose tops my mother had carefully written the year of purchase, since after one winter they all began to look the same.

Every year, the morning after my arrival, the pancakes would stick to the frying pan. The drip coffeepot refused to drip. The toast would burn on the toasting rack that fitted over a burner on the stove, and I would burn my fingers trying to get it off. This resistance to casual use brought back, bit by bit, forgotten skills. As I relearned the knack of washing dishes in a small basin of water, of striking kitchen matches against damp sandpaper, of baking my own bread in the willful oven, a self emerged from hibernation that I otherwise never experienced--one that knew its way around.

The Castine kitchen seemed much more ordinary, but that was because I hadn't learned to read it yet. The appliances were extra-large: the freezer section of the refrigerator took up one whole side; the stove had two ovens, one large, one small. The refrigerator spoke of distance--it was a long drive to the nearest supermarket, and farther still to the nearest good one.

What the stove spoke of, however, was weather. It would be months before I discovered this, but that Castine place was a house besieged by cold. Not only was it a cottage, but it was nestled low into the side of a wooded hill, where the winter sun could barely touch it. The kitchen, stuck to the far end of the house, had three outside walls. The winter cold pushed right through them. No amount of heat would drive it out; the best I could hope for, I learned, was to pin it to the floor. When I sat at the kitchen table, I could reach down and touch it, a foot-deep layer of frigid air gnawing quietly at my feet.

The Castine cottage had a tiny Irish Waterford woodstove in the living room. I took this to be the equivalent of a fireplace. I imagined myself lolling in its toasty warmth on winter mornings, frying up buckwheat pancakes and brewing coffee on its cooking plate. However, as the sole source of winter heat, the stove was at once too small to warm the house and far too hot to sit by. During the day, I seemed to be anywhere but in that room.

And how it ate up wood. I brought it in daily from the enormous, ice-locked woodpile, armloads full, and stacked it on the floor to thaw. All through the dead of winter I fed the stove, as if it were a baby, every two hours, day and night. I put my bed beside it to stay warm and to make less onerous the nighttime feedings: midnight, two, four, six, and eight.

Wood: the whole place had a permanent smoky tang. Little wonder that, the summer after, I was inspired to dig my parents' meat smoker from their barn and take it home. I set it up on the cottage deck and, for the first time in my life, began to turn out serious barbecue. A further permutation would be the building of (and subsequent struggle to master) an outdoor wood-fired bread oven.

But I lived all winter in that summer cottage in front of the double-barreled electric stove. Each morning, first thing, I used the small oven to roast a fresh batch of coffee beans; when I came back from the walk into town, I made a batch of sausage and biscuits in it to eat while I was going through the mail. The small oven was also the perfect place for baking beans, the larger one for making a skillet of griddle cornbread. There was never such a situation for baking in my life and never such persuasive motivation. By the next summer I was turning out fresh raspberry cake and green pea pie.

Even as a teenager, I could feel the summer cottage of my youth slowly but steadily sloughing off its past as a snake does its skin. Electricity came up the road; electric lights and the refrigerator followed soon after, As islanders phased out their iceboxes, the ice boat stopped coming. With electricity, kerosene lamps became at once an affectation and a hazard. And few Maine towns now permit outhouses in any but the most temporarily inhabited hunting camps; the island cottage now has indoor plumbing.

All this is fine. It isn't that I can't bear how things change--it's that I can't bear to be the one who does the changing. If, at forty-four, I found myself a year-round tenant in someone else's summer cottage, it was because I'm gun-shy of owning property. For years and years I thought of myself as someone who yearned to own his own place. But when I had the chance to buy the cottage in Castine at the end of my tenure there, I turned it down. Matt and I moved to Steuben instead.

Like everyone else, I cling to the things I own, but I have learned to tremble at the idea of possessing place--to live in a summer cottage is to be constantly reminded of its vulnerability. Every texture, every timbre--the smell of sun-soaked shingles or of coffee percolating up through attic floorboards--reminds us that however often we may be allowed to experience these things, we can also never hope to own them. To try to is to risk losing everything about them that we love.

To buy the cottage would have meant becoming a home owner. It would have meant doing what the owners did the moment I moved out: ripping out the kitchen ceiling, floors, and walls; installing modular cabinetry complete with dishwasher; taking the woodstove out of the living room and putting in forced-air oil heat instead.

The essential difference between the local and the summer person, between the owner and the renter, then, is this: the latter is always conscious of his or her good fortune in being there at all. The local person sees the same things but is distanced from their poignancy; he is as unlikely to surrender to their sheer delight as to lie in bed and marvel at the beauty of his wife. It is there, he is not exactly insensible to it, but affection--if it is expressed at all--is conveyed through the deprecation that possession inevitably brings. Yeah, yeah, but you should have seen her when . Or, more dourly: Yeah, yeah, but you don't have to live with her .

Our culture doesn't permit our imagination the luxury of perceiving --even appreciating--the fact that houses also have a life. It is a realization possible only for people who have stayed in the same one all their lives, and they experience it subconsciously--that is, as a strong but inarticulate resistance to change.

Those of us who move into such a house find its aura almost impossible to save. The truth is, you can't move into someone else's place; instead, you inherit the mess that is their leavings. These things, everything in you rightly says, have to be fixed up. Then one thing leads to another--and there you are. The only alternative is to somehow leave what is not well enough alone.

Doing that is why, I think, each of my Maine kitchens has left its mark on me. They have given my cooking a certain shape that, when I moved on, it would both never assume again ... and never quite escape. Vulnerability to place: what else is "here" about? If you don't change a place into you, it will, after its fashion, change you into it. And you may get the better of the exchange in ways you don't expect.

I moved into the cottage in Castine in June of 1987. Summer went, and for the first time in my life, I stayed. I was so happy about that that I immediately started thinking, once again. This must be the place. As I now know, it wasn't. All that the feeling of welcome meant was that this place had remained just enough of a summer cottage to take a stranger in.

But that was all right. A few months later still, when it was me coming out of the cold into that winter kitchen, I started to hear what the room had tried to tell me from the first. Go throw some logs on the fire and get the coffee started , it was saying ... stay awhile .

Castine, Maine, July-October 1987

Steuben, Maine, June 1994

Green-Pea Pie

I first came across this pie in Camille Glenn's Heritage of Southern Cooking , and I think I would have been drawn to it even without her introductory evocation:

If I were asked to name the greatest fresh vegetable dish in the whole wide world, it would have to be Fresh Green Pea Pie ... It has succulence, flavor, freshness, elegance, and charm--and one doesn't meet it every day.

The notion of combining a rich short crust with the clean sweet taste of green peas moved directly from the page to my mouth, in that way that signals--even if you're just idly leafing through a cookbook--the first encounter with a recipe that is going to be hanging around in your kitchen for a while.

Fresh green-pea pie may seem like a strange dish to make itself at home in a Maine kitchen (how truly Southern it is, I just don't know--I've never seen it mentioned in any other cookbook). But when I set out to make it, I discovered that my subconscious had been busy adapting the recipe to accommodate--and resolve--two of my culinary preoccupations.

The first of these had been an obsession for several years: how to make a chicken pot pie in which the chicken is actually moist and succulent and the crust not soggy. Green-pea pie offered a solution. Make a pie seasoned with a hint of onion and lots of little bits of crisped chicken fat--what Jewish cooks call gribenes , the poultry variant of cracklings--and cook the chicken separately.

This proposition also addressed my second concern, which may not be a central one in your household but certainly was in mine: what to do with those large chunks of chicken fat that you pull out of the bird's cavity before poaching or roasting it. For a long time my answer was to bundle them in plastic wrap and toss them into the freezer, where they had a tendency to accumulate.

Since peas and onions (or, better, shallots) are about the only things worth putting in a chicken pie besides the chicken meat, it's no surprise that they make a terrific pie by themselves. And frozen peas do it best. This is because the baking period is just the time they need to heat up to perfection. If you use fresh peas--which ordinarily I prefer, even if they're old and mealy (as, in supermarkets, they always are)--they have to be precooked before they go into the pie, and so come out of it overcooked. Perhaps fresh baby peas straight from the garden would work ... but these are too rare a treat to risk finding out.

Green-pea pie made itself so quickly at home because it took a few simple things I already had in my kitchen and did something special to them. If you think a pie of peas is a silly notion, cut a slice and watch the contents swirl out into an alluvial delta of sparkling emerald ... taste the tender sweetness that melds so softly with those rich flakes of crust and unctuous little bits of chicken fat. From then on, you'll find reasons to make it often, chicken on the side or no. If your freezer isn't full of chicken-fat packs, a pea pie can also be seasoned with salt pork or with butter and a spritz of herb vinegar. However you make it, don't forget that it's a fine meal all by itself.

Green-Pea Pie

(SERVES 4 TO 6)

Your favorite pastry for a standard 9-inch 2-crust pie

Cooking oil

1/4 cup chicken fat, cubed

3 or 4 shallots, minced

3 cups frozen tiny green peas

1 tablespoon minced tarragon or parsley

Salt and pepper to taste

Remember to prepare the pastry ahead of time so it has a chance to relax in the refrigerator for about half an hour before you roll it out. When it is time to make the pie, preheat the oven to 375°F. While it is heating, roll out the pastry for the pie, setting the bottom crust into the pie pan.

In a hot skillet made slick with a little cooking oil, render the chicken fat, scraping the bits as they crisp into a small bowl. When all the bits have been removed, add the minced shallots and sauté briefly until translucent. Put these in the bowl with the fat bits, along with about a tablespoon of the hot rendered chicken fat. Pour in the 3 cups of undefrosted peas and mix together well. Sprinkle with the minced herb and the salt and pepper.

Pour this mixture into the pie shell. Brush the edges with a little water and press on the top crust firmly, trimming away any excess dough and crimping the two crusts together with your fingers or a fork. Make slits in the top crust with the tip of a sharp paring knife so that steam can escape. Bake the pie until the crust is golden, about 35 minutes. Let it cool for 5 minutes or so before serving, but do serve it hot.

Castine, 1987