Fresh Strawberry Pie

If you’re a pie person – especially fruit pie – you will find this the most sublime specimen of pie extant. A flaky pie crust is filled with fresh fruit and topped with a thick, glossy sweetened glaze. I believe the best way to eat this pie, other than topped with whipped cream, of course, is alone, with nothing or no one to distract you from the experience. It’s not only the greatest kind of pie, it’s the greatest way to eat strawberries.

I found this recipe in an old Betty Crocker cookbook my mom had. It had all sorts of old-fashioned WASPy recipes in it, like for chipped beef and aspic. I can imagine one of my grandmother’s sisters or sisters-in-law giving the cookbook to my mother as a young bride so she’d be able to please her husband with her cookery. My parents’ life was so far from that postwar tableau that I’m sure I used that cookbook more than my mom did.

This is actually more of a formula than a recipe, since it’s so easily adapted to other kinds of fruit: Fill pie; mash another cup of fruit, then boil with a cup of sugar and 3 tablespoons corn starch. Simple dimple.

Fresh Strawberry Pie
makes one 9-inch pie 

One gallon ripe strawberries, including 1 cup chopped strawberries
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons corn starch
One prebaked homemade pie crust (or a baked storebought pie crust, I grudgingly acceed)

Rinse the strawberries in a colander and let drain. Slice off the leafy tops and cut enough strawberries (in quarters or sixths, depending on how big the berries are) to fill the pie shell. Resist the temptation to mound the pie sky high. The crust won’t be able to handle the weight of the fruit and you’ll have a mess on your hands when you slice it. Think slightly domed, not volcanic. 

Chop one cup of strawberries and place them in a sauce pan. Smash with a potato masher (you don’t need to liquify, however). Add the sugar and corn starch. Cook the fruit mixture, bringing it to a boil, stirring frequently until the glaze thickens and becomes shiny. Boil the glaze for 10 minutes. Turn off heat.

Pour or spoon the glaze over the pie evenly. (It’s hot – remember the jam?) Let cool and then chill completely  in the refrigerator. Slice and top with as much whipped cream as actuarial tables will allow.

I’ve made fresh blueberry pies and fresh peach pies. I truly can’t tell you which is the best. Make them all; make others I haven’t thought of.

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