Category: Desserts

Joyce’s Angel Pecan Pie

Like all of us, Jerri’s sister-in-law, Joyce, had a couple of little quirks that give her a special place in our memories. For instance, Jerri and I have occasional attacks of neatness, but for Joyce neatness was a chronic condition. She disliked clutter. When my T-shirts are no longer suitable for polite company, Jerri turns them into cleaning rags. Joyce took worn clothes to a recycling center. There were no rags in her home.

If you wanted to reread a story from last Sunday’s newspaper, you would be out of luck in Joyce’s household. When a meal was over, she got up and did the dishes rather than stalling an hour in the hope that some kitchen elves would do the job for her. They have never lent me a helping hand, but one would think that they would have left her kitchen spotless if she had only given them the chance. Like the cobbler in the story, she was a very generous Christian lady.

Her daughter, Lori, told us of another of Joyce’s quirks a few years ago. Every year when the family sat down for dinner on Christmas Day, there was a cut glass bowl filled with beautiful sweet canned Mandarin oranges on the table. Joyce never explained why she served canned oranges on Christmas Day, and Lori never asked. As you might expect, she grew up thinking that they were an expensive gourmet treat.

Lori learned otherwise when she moved away from home and started doing her own shopping. “You can even buy them at Kroger’s!” she said, “and they’re cheap! Maybe they weren’t when Mom and Dad were first married,” she mused as she told Jerri the story. It’s a mystery. My guess is that Joyce’s mother made sure that Mandarin orange slices were a part of Christmas dinner. Tevye, the milkman in Fiddler on the Roof, has the explanation: “Tradition!!”

There is, however, no mystery about why Joyce made made Angel Pecan Pie. She didn’t like to make pie crusts. Angel Pecan Pie makes its own crust. It is absurdly easy to make and is just plain delicious. Jerri asked for the recipe and Joyce obliged. It is an attractive pie suitable for serving to special guests and it is so easy to make that your family can enjoy it often. Jerri likes it because it is not as sweet as traditional pecan pie. I like anything covered with whipped cream.

INGREDIENTS:

4 egg whites
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. baking powder
Dash of salt
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup whipping cream
Another dash of salt
1 heaping T granulated sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 300º and grease a nine-inch pie plate. Beat four egg whites until stiff peaks form. Mix the dry ingredients together and blend in the egg whites. Spread the batter in the pie plate and bake the pie for thirty minutes. A toothpick inserted near the center of the pie will come out clean when the pie is done.

Remove the pie from the oven, allow it to cool thoroughly on a rack, then refrigerate it for at least a couple of hours.

Whip a cup of whipping cream flavored with a generous tablespoon of sugar, a dash of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla. Spread the whipped cream on the pie and refrigerate until you serve it.

Summer Cooler

You don’t know how good buttermilk tastes until you have climbed a mile up a mountainside on a hot day. Despite our lack of hiking shoes, a friend and I had decided to see what Bad Reichenhall, Germany, looked like from Austria. It was 1965 and we were studying conversational German in that small German city. We crossed a footbridge over the creek that marked the border and started up the mountain.

It was an easy walk through open space on the edge of town. There were no signs, fences or guards, but once we had walked over the footbridge, we felt like world travelers. To be honest, Austria was pretty much like Germany, but it was the fourth country I had set foot in, the first three being the USA, Canada and Germany.

While there were no guards, there was someone watching us from a spot several hundred feet above us near a small building in the pasture. We began wondering if it was really wise to walk in someone else’s pasture without permission and briefly considered making a run for it back to the safety of the city. But we were young and confident that we could talk our way through any problem.

Though we were perhaps a bit too confident in our conversational German, we did manage to explain to the old lady overseeing her cows that we were American students at the Goethe Institute who just wanted to enjoy the view of the city from her beautiful pasture. She smiled and told us that we were welcome.

She could see that we were hot and thirsty and asked us if we would like “ein Becher Buttermilch” (a cup of buttermilk). We both said we would. She stood up from the bench she was sitting on, wiped her hands on her apron and went into the shed which we recognized as a spring house. A minute later she came out with two stoneware mugs that must have held a pint each.

How generous of her, we thought, until she said, “Funfzig Pfennig jedes” (fifty cents each). We would have paid more. The buttermilk was cold and delicious, with little bits of butter floating in it. It was so good, in fact, that we made the climb twice more over the next month and had a chance to learn a little about her. Among other things, we learned that she sold her buttermilk to lots of hikers and her butter to a shopkeeper in Salzburg.

Today much of the pasture is covered with a housing development, and hikers who want a glass of buttermilk need to find a different lady on a mountainside.

There are, of course, a few people who say that they don’t like buttermilk. Here is a way to overcome that prejudice. A student from Texas introduced Jerri to this recipe when she was a house fellow in Slichter Hall at the University of Wisconsin. It sounds odd, but it is delicious and refreshing. Here’s what you do.

INGREDIENTS:

Buttermilk
Sherbet

PROCEDURE:

Put two scoops of sherbet in a tall glass. Add ice cold buttermilk. Stir gently with an iced tea spoon. Enjoy like a root beer float with less sugar.

NOTES: Orange and raspberry sherbets are our favorites, but you can use any flavor you like. As an option, serve a scoop of sherbet covered with three or four tablespoons of buttermilk for a light dessert.