A Berry Unique Pie
June is strawberry season! So I knew that this month’s pie had to include summer’s sweetheart. If I could only eat one food for the rest of my life, it would be strawberries. I’ve always loved them. They’re red and sweet and make me nostalgic for the summers of my childhood. This month’s pie celebrates the flavor of fresh strawberries and has a secret ingredient hidden under the crust!
Baking Up Memories
Strawberries are a whimsical fruit. All berries are. Maybe it’s because they’re small enough to fit in your palm or because they come in such deep, vivid shades of red, purple, and blue. Maybe it’s how they grow—in wild, thorny thickets, or peppered amongst tiny white flowers. Whatever the reason, they seem like food out of a fairytale.
Fairytales and fairies dominated my childhood daydreams. I spent a lot of time imagining what it might be like to be the size of a key, with petals for skirts and acorn caps for hats. I read every book and watched every movie I could find, always hungry for information about what fairies ate, what kind of wings they had, what their houses looked like, and how to find them in the wild. But one resource stood out amongst all the rest.
FairyTale: A True Story is a 1997 live action children’s film about the Cottingley fairy hoax. If you’ve never heard of the Cottingley fairy hoax, here’s the short version: In 1917, cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths took a series of supernatural photographs in Cottingley glen. They created fairies using paper cut outs and hat pins and posed alongside them. When the photos were developed, the cousins insisted they were real. Eventually the photos captured the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which sparked a global debate about the existence of fairies.
I was OBSESSED with this movie. There’s one scene I remember in which Elsie and Frances get up in the middle of the night to secretly make a miniature house as an offering to the fairies. The house looked like it had grown right out of the forest floor. It had a moss roof, feather-tipped cupola, a twisty-turvy staircase, a paper waterfall, and a well! I decided immediately that I wanted to make my own fairy house, and I knew just the adult for the job!
My Grandmother was very creative. She loved drawing, stained glass making, and creating miniature worlds for model train sets. When I used to talk about my love of fairies and fantasy, she always honored my interest with seriousness. If anyone would be willing to help me, it would be her.
I told her my plan and showed her the house from the movie as an example. I was ready to start building that very second! She gently lowered my expectations (we didn’t have moss or vines to work with. Plus it was a complicated house—perhaps too complicated for one afternoon). She suggested we start small, use our imaginations, and see what we could come up with.
We found a small, square, plastic storage box. It had a hinged lid—perfect for a fairy house on-the-go. We taped a few packing peanuts together to make a bed and folded a quilted paper towel into a blanket. We turned more packing peanuts into chairs, and sat them around a table made out of a repurposed pizza saver. I even drew miniature pictures that we taped to the walls. Our house was really coming together!
That night I left the little house in the family room, in the hopes that any local fairies might visit it while everyone was asleep. When I woke up the next morning, I was thrilled to find evidence of a fairy activity inside the little house.
The Result
The recipe for this pie—like all of the others I’ve made this year—comes from my Grandmother’s 1965 Farm Journal Pie cookbook. It’s called French Strawberry Pie, and its filling takes inspiration from classic French fruit tarts.
You start with a blind baked crust. Once it’s cooled, you brush the empty pie shell with melted currant jelly. The shell is then filled with vanilla custard, and topped with fresh strawberries. The finishing touch is a layer of currant jelly brushed over the berries. That’s what gives them their glassy look.
This pie was light and refreshing! I love the burst of flavor from the fresh strawberries. The custard was thick and not overly sweet. The addition of currant jelly was part of what drew me to this recipe, but I was a little disappointed with it. I was hoping the flavor would be more pronounced, but it faded into the background. However, that might be my fault. The recipe calls for 12 oz. of jelly—that’s an entire jar! It just seemed like too much. I didn’t skimp on the layer of jelly over the crust, but I did hold back a bit. Next time I would add a lot more jelly to bring some brightness to the vanilla custard. The concept of this pie has a lot of potential. In the future I’d love to try experimenting with different flavors—fresh blackberries and blackberry jelly, fresh apricots and apricot jelly, or even mixing and matching fruits and jelly flavors. The possibilities are endless!
