Top Chef

We were pretty pleased to announce yesterday that Jeanne was named the Top Pastry Chef in the Feast magazine Feast 50 awards. We actually were notified way back in late March, but Feast delayed on the announcement because we were in the height of a worldwide pandemic. Fair enough.

Here is what I particularly enjoy about this accolade - as you likely know, Jeanne is not a trained pastry chef. She didn’t attend culinary school and she eschews most recipes found on Pinterest because she feels strongly that a lot of food bloggers add unnecessary ingredients and require extra kitchen tools simply to appear more skilled. (If you disagree, you can take this issue up with her. Though, I was looking today at something that required "culinary lavender” and I morphed into Jeanne because I sorta rolled my eyes and wondered how disappointed someone would be to start making a dessert and find out they needed culinary lavender, because that can’t be easy to source in Columbia, Missouri.)

Classical training aside, Jeanne’s mother taught her everything about pie baking that she knows. And sometimes when I start to take for granted what we’ve accomplished at PJP, I think how my grandmother would likely be astounded that in 2020, her daughter and granddaughter - and now great-granddaughter - have created a #worldpiedomination movement based on a pie crust recipe she learned and made every single day without a recipe. (Also, can we talk about a world where she made pies from scratch every single day because she was feeding a lot of people who were farming all day and how much we’ve changed from that to our convenience culture now?)

Jeanne and I were making pie dough several weeks ago and I actually learned that my grandmother Irene learned to make our pie crust from her mother-in-law, Pliny Jane. I always just assumed it was her own mother - my great-grandmother - though Jeanne then said that Irene’s mother was a “actually, a terrible baker”. Ouch. I had no idea. And where Pliny Jane learned it…well, she used all things easily accessible to someone in the late 1800s: flour, salt, lard, and water. And she worked based on the feel of the dough only, adding ingredients where needed. Zero culinary lavender involved.

So Pliny Jane taught Irene, who taught Jeanne, who taught me, and now I’ve taught my kids…and here we are in 2020. And there is still no written recipe for our dough, though at this point in the game we should probably write it down and lock in a vault somewhere. I’ll leave that decision up to the top pastry chef.

(PS - Here is Irene and me, 1975ish)