Pie Talk #1: Pound Cake

by Nancy Rommelmann

Who can say what inspires a woman to stop trying for Genius level on the NYT’s Spelling Bee and actually do something productive? Well I can: It was listening to my pod partner Sarah Hepola’ Smoking Diary #6. Could I do something like that? I doubted it, except if it were about…

So we are talking pie, or more broadly, dessert, including lemon bars and malted milk and everything caramel and everyday poundcake. Will there be a celebrity chef (though I think she’d prefer to be called cook, and friend) in my apartment this week? Yes. Per usual, there will also be something I bake on offer, something casual and yummy, no drumroll no spotlight. Putting food on the table can be casual; also, a chore, an intimidation, a hilarious disaster (I’ll tell you some time about the shrimp scampi), an act of communion.

“Isn’t it funny we get to eat every day? Isn’t it great?” my daughter said last night, as we worked through a bag of Gardetto’s at the train station. Yes. So funny, so great.

Included herein: A recipe you can make with ingredients you likely already have, the result of which will provoke the rapturous eye glaze people get when you feed them something sweet. I added those last two words with the understanding that there will be people, and they are almost always men, who claim to not like sweets. Uh-huh. Maybe next time I’ll offer the recipe for my mother-in-law’s pecan cookies, which you roll in powdered sugar while hot, inspiring my friend, the 6’5” Croatian rocket scientist and avowed non-sweets eater, to dazedly intone, “I cannot stop eating these white balls!”