Lemon Buttermilk Pie

I prefer to eat out for breakfast rather than for dinner. There's something nice about starting the day with a great meal and then trundling off to work. This is nothing new. I've been a sucker for great breakfasts for years and when I find a place I really like, I tend to go back again and again.

In the early 1990's, Paradise Cafe in Lawrence, Kansas was one of those places. My friend David was a waiter at Paradise — and a big part of the reason I went. But nearly half the reason I made the short walk to the cafe was its lemon buttermilk pie. Available most days, but not always. Some mornings, my breakfast was simply tea and a slice of that pie.

Paradise Cafe is now closed and David moved to New York, but before we left Lawrence, he scored for me the recipe for the pie. I made it on a whim last night for the first time in years and was reminded of why I liked it in the first place; a light, sweet custard spiked with lemon zest and the tang of buttermilk that just collapses in my mouth was a fantastic way to cap the night.

These days, if I were to muck about with flavors, I would consider adding cardamom or a tot of rum, but the simplicity of the pie still resonates with me after all these years and I made it as I always do.

The original recipe called for making two pies at once, so — unless I plan to give one away — I scale it back for one. Here's my slightly tweaked recipe:

Lemon Buttermilk Pie

1.5 c sugar
3 eggs (4 if they're small)
2 Tbl all purpose flour
¼ c melted butter
¾ c buttermilk
1 lemon, zest and strained juice
pinch of salt
1 uncooked pie crust

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Combine the eggs, sugar, and flour in the bowl of a mixer. Mix until well blended and the mixture is a light yellow. Beat in the melted butter, buttermilk, lemon, and a pinch — just a knifepoint — of salt. Pour into the prepared pie crust and bake for 30-40 minutes until the center is just set. Set on a rack. It will thicken on cooling. 

I like it at room temperature, maybe slightly warm. Whipped cream if you like, but that would be overkill for me.

Goes well with:

• William S. Burroughs' Birthday Beer, another tale of mid-90's Lawrence, Kansas.
• Chocolate Pie with Dos Maderass PX Rum, a different diner-style pie I recently made.
• The ever-popular ginger pie, inspired by a college viewing of Harold & Maude. Easily the most read post I've ever written. 

Chocolate Pie with Dos Maderas PX Rum

Leftover dessert? An alien concept. Put before me a cupcake, a slice of pie, a cobbler, crumble, grunt, slump, cookies, ice cream, cake, tortes, tarts, stolen, krapfen, baklava, cannoli, pudding — or, face it, nearly any sugar-egg-flour combination — and I will eat it down to the plate. None of this “just a taste” nonsense.

The flip side is that, because I know I’ll devour sweets, I don’t keep them around the house. If we bake cookies, friends, neighbors, and co-workers taste the bounty. Red velvet cake? Half of the last one I made was claimed by a friend 30 minutes after it was frosted.

The chocolate pie should have followed the same path. It didn’t. Naturally, everyone in the house got a slice, but then we repeated until all that was left was a pie pan smeared with chocolate and tiny black crumbs.

This was originally a Martha Stewart recipe and, except for the liquor, a pretty typical diner-style pie, but I tweaked it a bit and swapped out her suggested whiskey in the pie with Dos Maderas PX, a flavorful blend of aged Barbados and Guyana rums. After basking five years in used bourbon barrels under the Caribbean sun, it’s shipped to Jerez, Spain for five more years in two different sherry barrels. Score a bottle if you see it. I often sip it just neat. And because a rum-laced pie’s not enough, I spiked the whipped cream with some of it as well.

Is it any wonder we ate the whole damn thing?

Chocolate Pie with Dos Maderas PX

Crust
6.5 oz/185g chocolate wafer cookies (about 30)
1 Tbl sugar or vanilla sugar
6 Tbl/85g unsalted butter, melted

Pulverize the cookies in a food processor. Transfer the resulting fine crumbs to a medium mixing bowl and stir in the sugar. Add melted butter and mix with a large mixing spoon or spatula until the entire mixture looks and feels like soft, wet sand.

Turn crust mixture out into a 9-inch round pie plate. Using the back of the spoon, press the mixture evenly into the bottom and up the sides. Transfer crust to freezer.

Filling
½ c sugar (4 oz/100g)
3 Tbl malted milk powder (35g/1.25 oz)
1 tsp salt
¼ cup cornstarch (35g/1.25 oz)
5 large egg yolks
2 c/500ml whole milk
½ c/125ml heavy cream
5 oz/140g dark chocolate (60-70% cacao), coarsely chopped
1 Tbl aged rum (Dos Maderas PX)
1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Make the filling: In a medium saucepan, whisk together sugar, malted milk powder, salt, and cornstarch. Add the egg yolks and whisk until combined; mixture will look like a thick paste.

Slowly pour in milk and cream, whisking constantly. Bring to a boil over medium heat, whisking constantly; let boil for 30 seconds and immediately remove from heat.

Add chocolate, rum, and vanilla; whisk until well combined and mixture has cooled slightly. Let stand, at room temperature, for 15 minutes. If a thin skin forms on the filling while cooling, whisk until skin is gone. Remove the pie crust from the freezer and pour the slightly cooled filling into the crust. Refrigerate for 4 hours before serving.

Serve with whipped cream lightly sweetened and dosed with additional Dos Maderas PX. If you’ve got leftover chocolate wafer cookies, now is a good time to crumble one or two and sprinkle them over the whipped cream-lashed pie slices.

Goes well with:

• Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers — these dark, almost black little buggers are not always easy to find. Amazon sells a 12-pack of them which is more than I'd ever need, but maybe you've got a buddy who would go halfsies with you. Or have a bake sale...

Well, Hey, There, Ham Pie

With weather growing warmer (admittedly, a relative concept here), I find myself mulling over lunch outdoors more often. While we live just a few blocks from San Diego’s sprawling Balboa Park, I don’t pack enormous picnic hampers, toting bottles of wine, ironed linens, and my best silver down the street, but I do like something other than the day’s paper tucked under my arm when I take in the greenery for a lunch break.

Enter the ham pie. A few months back, the BBC posted a recipe for Country Ham Pie (article here). Not country ham, as Americans understand the term; country-style (e.g., free form) pie, made with puff pastry and ham. My take is slightly different from the BBC’s, but just as easy.

Blessed with a surfeit of orgeat-basted ham leftover from an earlier roast, I ground a double handful of it, raided the fridge and freezer for the rest, and cranked out this simple lunch. Make the puff pastry yourself if you're feeling either industrious or virtuous, but if you’re a lazy-ass lout like me, find a decent frozen brand and thaw it for a quick lunch.

Ham Pie

2 x 375g/13oz packs chilled puff pastry
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
115g/4oz unsalted butter, melted
175g/6oz sharp cheddar cheese, grated
115g/4oz white bread crumbs or panko
3 tbsp freshly chopped chives
a handful of fresh spinach, roughly chopped
350g/12oz great ham, roughly chopped
290ml/½ pint sour cream, crema, or crème fraiche
salt and freshly ground black pepper
½ lemon, juice only (about 0.5 oz)
1 beaten egg, to glaze

Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F.

Cut just over half of one pack of the pastry and roll out to a rectangle to about 1/8” about and 28x28cm/11”x11” on a lightly floured chopping or pastry board. Insert a silicon sheet on a baking sheet, place the pastry base on top, and prick well with a fork.

Bake the pastry base in the oven for 10-15 minutes until golden brown and crisp. Set aside to cool.

Meanwhile prepare the filling. Melt the butter with the garlic, then cool slightly. In a medium-sized bowl mix the melted butter and garlic, cheese, and breadcrumbs together.

When the base is cooked and cool, scatter half the cheese mixture onto the base. Leave a border of at least 2.5cm/1”.

Sprinkle over the chopped ham, soured cream, spinach, and chives.

Tip the remaining cheese mixture over evenly and sprinkle with the lemon juice. Season lightly with salt and pepper.

Roll out the remaining packet of pastry 5cm/2” larger than the base.

Use the beaten egg to glaze the border and place the remaining pastry square over the top. Trim to fit, pinch the edges with a fork, and glaze the top with beaten egg.

Use any remaining pastry/filling to make small buns (chef’s treat: nobody needs to know).

Bake for 25-30 minutes until the pastry is golden brown and crisp. Serve.

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Ginger Pie, a Rescued Recipe

Harold and Maude—Hal Ashby's’ black-humored 1971 film—once inspired me to bake a pie. If I’d known how much research eventually would be involved in making the simple dessert, I’d’ve said to hell with it. The perseverance paid off.

In the movie, Ruth Gordon’s seventy-nine year old Maude invites a much younger Harold (played by Bud Cort) into her rail car home. Maude—eccentric, art-loving, vivacious—stands in wild contrast to morose Harold whose faked suicides are sad jokes staged to wring some evidence of warmth from his frosty mother. In the rail car, Maude offers him oat straw tea and ginger pie. While prospects of oat straw tea did nothing for me, I was left dumb in the wake of increasingly irrelevant dialog at the mention of ginger pie.

Ginger pie? I’m no stranger to baking, but I’d never heard of it. At first, I mistook the pie for a physical thing. It had a homespun, old-timey ring that reminded me of something long forgotten. Dandelion wine, maybe, or spring tonic. At first dozens, then hundreds, then—literally—thousands of cookbooks stymied me as I hunted for a recipe. Gingerbread, ginger tea, ginger snaps, stir-fries, ginger syrups, ginger cordials, chutneys, beers, ales, candies, ginger-lacquered duck, and more, but no ginger pie.

Since nothing suggested or resembled what I was looking for, I put together working notes on a recipe of my own. Some of the ingredients were obvious, but I felt as if I were reinventing something that should be easy to find: Pie? No problem—got pans, got dough. Next! A great big mess of ginger. And eggs. And…um… sugar, of course. Plus…maybe…damn. There’s got to be a recipe in one of these books.

But I forged on. Southern chess pie had a sturdy, crack-topped custard that seemed a versatile base—But what kind of ginger? Fresh? Candied? Dried and ground? Preserved in syrup? In sherry? Just ginger juice? I try each of those. Fresh ginger turned out to have the strongest, most assertive flavor, giving racy overtones to an otherwise sweet and homey pie.

Fresh ginger holds promises of liveliness and sass, of exotic and ancient histories. There is a potency in a fat hand of fresh ginger that just might inspire a breath of fire when it's reduced to tiny, tiny cubes and strewn throughout a rum-laced custard.

The search for the recipe and subsequent experiments with what I thought ginger pie should be brought me a deeper understanding of what I was stalking. When I failed to uncover any recipes, I went back to Maude, the root of my inspiration.

Her eccentric, nuts-to-tradition take on life is a big part of the film’s appeal. During a memorial Mass, she psst, psst, pssts Harold’s attention with sibilantly inappropriate offers of licorice. Her wistful reminiscences hint at a past built on old world loves and tragedies. Once a firebrand activist, Maude continues in small ways undermining worldly complacency by finding joy in simple, everyday things; somersaults, a field of daisies, raucous songs, and seagulls, as well as frequent and spontaneous episodes of grand theft auto.

I came to realize that ginger pie was not some old-fashioned recipe fallen out of favor. It was more than that. By offering a slice, Maude extends not only hospitality, but a slyly camouflaged offer of herself and Harold’s first hints of escape from his doleful life. With the point of that pie, she wedges open Harold’s somber soul and floods it with bracing warmth and sweetness, the distillate of her own fading life’s fire and spice. Harold’s change is so profound that he picks up a banjo, abandons his mourning suits, turns cartwheels, and declares his intention to marry a woman old enough to be his grandmother.

This pie doesn’t affect those sorts of change; it’s not likely—not likely, mind you—to prompt proposals. Sitting here with a late-night wedge pilfered from the kitchen, though, I can’t help but smile. In the end, I don’t know what Maude’s recipe was, but I’ve cemented friendships over slices of this rich, ginger-and-rum custard pie. Surely that is the sort of thing she meant to dish up.

Ginger Pie

1 unbaked pie crust
¼-1/3 cup minced young ginger
2.5 oz aged rum*
1.5 cups sugar
8 Tbl unsalted butter, room temperature
¼ tsp salt
3 eggs
2.5 Tbl all purpose flour
¼ cup heavy cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon zest

At least one hour before beginning, combine the ginger and rum in a small bowl or jar and set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar. Add eggs one at the time and mix after each addition. Add remaining ingredients, including the rum and ginger, and combine thoroughly.

Pour the mixture into the unbaked pie crust and bake at 350F about 50 minutes, until the center has mostly set, but is still just a little wobbly – it will firm on standing. It should have a slightly darkened, crusty top. If necessary, cover the pan with a tented piece of aluminum foil or an overturned stainless steel bowl to prevent overbrowning while the pie bakes.

Warm, the pie cries for heavy dollops of whipped cream barely able to hold itself together. Cold, it’s best to sneak mall slivers while the rest of the house sleeps.

* Appleton Estate V/X or Clement VSOP are both grand rums for the pie. You want something with some age to it. In a pinch, you could use a white rum, but avoid spiced and dark ones: After all, this is a ginger pie, not a rum pie.

Rowley’s Lemon Punsch Pie

I live in California where the mixers grow on trees. In some places, the lanes are so lousy with oranges or lemons that they truly are gutter trash. I’m still fascinated by it all.

When I had a sample of Erik Ellestad’s lemon-infused Swedish punsch at Tales of the Cocktail during the panel “Making Your Own Cocktail Ingredients” I realized I wanted to play around with the liqueur. So I tweaked one of his recipes to come up with a one-liter batch and am very pleased with it.

What to call this thing…I like “lemon punsch pie” but then “punch drunk pie” works or “punsch debris pie” or even “enhooched pie” since my take on an old Shaker recipe definitely carries a strong smell of delicious Swedish punsch from the enhooched lemons slices used to flavor it.

Call it what you want, this is a tasty pie—if prepared with the thinnest-sliced lemons. Honest, if your slices are thicker than, say, your knife blade, they’re too thick and will never be tender enough for the pie, no matter how low and slowly you bake it. Use a mandoline or a Benriner if you've got one.

Go on and gild the lily with a fat dollop of whipped cream, flavored with vanilla extract and a knifepoint of salt (which in small enough doses doesn’t taste of salt but enhances the creaminess of the cream. Seriously. Try it.).

Rowley’s Lemon Punsch Pie

Start by using the sliced lemons from a recipe of Swedish punsch (such as Erik's or mine). If you use either recipe, you’ll have too many slices, so discard about one-third of the volume.

• 9 oz/250g thinly sliced punsch lemons, seeded
• 2 cups/14.5 oz/420g granulated sugar
• 1 Tbl Swedish punsch (in addition to whatever clings to the lemons)
• A pinch of salt
• 4 eggs, beaten
• Egg white, beaten (to seal the edges and brush the top)
• Two 10” pie crusts, uncooked*

In a nonreactive container, mix the sugar, lemon slices, and additional tablespoon of punsch. Let rest overnight until a thick, sludgy syrup forms (not all the sugar will dissolve).

The next day, mix together the lemon slice sludge with the four beaten eggs and salt until the sugar and eggs are combined. The sugar still won’t all dissolve. If you were worried about such things, you wouldn’t be making this pie, so hush.

Preheat your oven to 450°F/230°C.

Lay a pie crust in a 10” pan add the filling. Wet the edges of the crust with the egg white wash. Place the other 10” crust on top, pressing to seal the edges. Trim the excess dough. Lightly brush the egg while across the top and, using a sharp knife, puncture the top crust only with a dozen or so small slits to let steam escape.

Cook the pie for 15 minutes, turn down the heat to 375°F/190°C and cook another 30 minutes or so until the top is golden brown and the custard is lightly set.

Cool on a wire rack and serve with that fat dollop of cream. Go on, you know you want to.

*Usually I make my own pie crusts, but it's been so frackin' hot I wanted to be in the kitchen as little a possible and cheated by using a box of Trader Joe's frozen crusts. Eh. They're ok. You'll notice that I'm no photographer. I'll make it properly when it cools off. Lord knows I'll run out of the punsch soon enough.


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Swedish Punsch (and Lemon Punsch Pie)

In which Rowley steals a recipe and lays the groundwork for updating an old Shaker classic dessert

(which was posted later that week).

I was skeptical of the boozy tea-and-cardamom flavored liqueur called Swedish punsch (or, punch), mostly because I’m leery of Scandinavian culinary delights such as lutefisk, reindeer, and whale. I shouldn’t have worried. There is aquavit, after all, and a robust home distilling tradition in those frosty northern climes. Plus, I like tea; cardamom can be delicious; and punch usually goes down without a fight.

Final realization? I should have made this long ago.

Given the cardamom and lemon, two flavors that find their way into cookies, pies, and cakes, the recipe also got me thinking about how the spent lemons (used to flavor the spirits) could be incorporated into baking instead of getting pitched once they'd given up their flavor to the punsch.

Now, you could drink this liqueur neat, chilled, but there’s a tradition of using it as a cocktail ingredient that’s a better route. First thing to do (that is, if you can’t find a bottle of the actual stuff) is to score a bottle of Batavia Arrack von Oosten, a Javanese rice-and-sugar cane spirit that is once again available in the US through Haus Alpenz. That will give a noticeable funky character to the final product. Which is good.













For a recipe using the Arrack—please, the Indonesian stuff, not the eastern Mediterranean anise liqueurs—I turned to Erik Ellestad’s Underhill Lounge. Erik’s recipe makes about three liters; a little much for something I’d never tried to make before, so I scaled the recipe to make one liter.

If I had known how good it would be, how fantastic in mixed drinks, I would have gone for the full three-liter batch.

Next time.

Swedish Punsch (one liter yield)

Spirit Base

• 17 oz/500ml El Dorado 5 Year demarara rum
• 8.5 oz/250ml Batavia Arrack van Oosten
• 3 lemons, sliced thinly and seeded

Put the lemon slices, along with any accumulated juice, into a half-gallon non-reactive container with a sealable lid (e.g., a big ol’ Mason or le Parfait preserving jar). Let macerate six hours. Don’t leave it all day or overnight; you don’t want to extract too much of the bitterness from the lemon. It is important to slice the lemons as thinly as possible, say no thicker than a credit card (note that I don't follow my advice in the picture; the pie would've been much more tender had I done so).

Meanwhile, prepare the tea syrup (below) and allow it to cool to room temperature. After six hours, pour the arrack/rum infusion off the lemon slices (don’t squeeze them). Set the enhooched lemon slices aside (you may want to use them to make the lemon punsch pie. If not, pitch 'em, compost 'em, or slop the hogs with them).

Pour the flavored rum mix through a funnel into the one-liter bottle containing the tea syrup. Shake gently to mix and set aside at least one day to mellow.

Tea Syrup

• 8.5 oz/250ml boiling water
• 1 Tbl/6 grams orange pekoe tea
• 2 cardamom pods, crushed
• 1 1/3 cups/280g demarara sugar

Place the dry loose tea and crushed cardamom pods in French press. Heat a small pot of water to the boil, then measure 250ml. Pour this hot water over the tea and cardamom and steep for six minutes.

While tea is steeping, pour sugar through a funnel into a one-liter bottle.

After six minutes, strain the tea (through a coffee filter or a dampened paper towel or cheesecloth if necessary) into the bottle containing the sugar. Seal the bottle and shake the holy living bejesus out of it until the sugar dissolves completely.

To get you started on some tasty drinks, here’s a trio of recipes that use punsch. Try them all and for more recipes, check out cocktaildb.com.

Boomerang
3/4 oz rye (Sazerac)
3/4 oz Swedish punsch
3/4 oz dry vermouth
1 dash Angostura bitters
1 dash fresh lemon juice

Stir in mixing glass with ice & strain.

Doctor Cocktail
2 oz Jamaica rum
1 oz Swedish punsch
1 oz fresh lime juice

Shake in iced cocktail shaker & strain.

~ from Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails

100% Cocktail
2 oz Swedish punsch
½ oz fresh orange juice
½ oz fresh lemon juice
One drop of Angostura bitters (for garnish)

Shake punsch and juices with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a single drop of bitters.

~ from Jeff Hollinger and Rob Schwartz’s The Art of the Bar: Cocktail’s Inspired by the Classics

And that pie recipe that uses the spent lemons from the arrack/rum infusion? Hold yer horses. It's coming. [edit: now it's posted]