When you visit artist Lauri Luck’s studio, you get a slice
There are cake people and there are pie people. While I enjoy the occasional cake, I adore pie, with their blend of flaky crust encasing juicy or creamy fillings. Cakes demand perfection; pies are more forgiving. Cakes insist on a balance of chemistry; there are no rules with pie. They will adapt to whatever pan is available, and can morph into freewheeling galettes or turnovers if a pie pan is not at hand.
If you have a fruit tree (or a friend with one), pies are always the perfect solution to a fruit bonanza. Growing in my yard are apple, pear and peach trees, and a thicket of wild blackberries, and I make pies out of all their fruit. But in all my years of pie baking and eating, I’ve never tasted pies as yummy as some I ate this summer, created by two different local entrepreneurs and masters of the art of pie, both of them continuing their grandmothers’ legacy. Here’s part one of a 2-part series on some great local piemakers.
Family, dog, art and pies
Artist Lauri Luck creates colorful paintings of dogs pictured in their daily habitats, exuding personality and character. Visit her painting studio, and Lauri will offer you a piece of homemade pie to enjoy while you look around. As an experienced pie aficionado, I know a good pie when I taste it; and when I took my first bite of Lauri’s apple pie, I was blown away. Turns out, Lauri is both a painting and a pie making pro. She and her sons bake a batch of pies every week to serve at “Pie-Eyed” studio weekends and for custom orders. Her personal motto is “pie fixes everything.”
You will want to make her studio a stop on your ARTrails tour this year, both for the art and the pie. Originally from Norfolk, Virginia, her southern-hospitality shines on Pie-Eyed weekends at her studio, behind Renga Arts on Hwy. 116 in Sebastopol, where she dishes up her “Lulu’s Southern Kitchen” recipes.
Lulu was her Dad’s nickname for her. He was in the advertising business, and as a child, Lauri and her sister would go to the office with him, use all the art materials, read the arts magazines and watch color TV. Her early influences from both sides of the family tree have fused into her current lifestyle of family, dogs, art and pies. She learned to make pies from her grandmother, a Depression-era recycler, who made a traditional oil crust for her pecan pie, rolling it between pieces of waxed paper saved from the linings of cereal boxes.
Southern traditions mixed
with wild-food inspirations
Lauri honors the southern pie traditions, using her grandmother’s piecrust recipe, with Wesson Oil, whole milk and all-purpose flour, and rolling it out between pieces of waxed paper with the heavy wooden rolling pin she brought with her (along with nine 10-inch glass pie plates) when she moved to California from Richmond, Virginia following her art education at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Her lemon chess pie, a southern traditional pie made with eggs, sugar and lemon, is adapted from a recipe in a cookbook called “Charlotte Cooks Again,” published in 1981 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Lauri adds a swirl of homemade raspberry syrup on top. She also makes a “crack pie,” adapted from a recipe from the Momofuku Milk Bar in Brooklyn, New York. The ingredients include butter, sugar, cream, eggs, oats, milk and flour; and although it’s similar to a southern shoofly pie, Lauri’s mother declared, “I can’t believe you’re makin’ that Yankee pie!”
Always interested in wild food, Lauri came across Euell Gibbon’s book “Stalking the Wild Asparagus” at the age of 13, which inspired her first wild blackberry pie. She still refers to his recipe, in her heavily notated paperback copy, for wild apple pie for her apple pie filling, adding lemon and using a combination of Fuji and Granny Smith apples, or sometimes Gravenstein apples.
Lauri’s 17-year old sons, Scout and Jonah Boese, will be helping her make pie fillings for the ARTrails weekends, saving up their pie-making earnings towards buying cars. They can bake 10 small pies at a time in the double oven of the stove that dominates their tiny kitchen in Tipsy House, a 1920s-era cabin Lauri shares with her family in the hills of Forestville, overlooking the Russian River.
For ARTrails, Lauri will have lots of pies to sample: apple, lemon chess with raspberry swirls, pear-cranberry, peach-raspberry and bumbleberry (bumbleberry pie originated in New England – bumble just means to put together whatever you have available, according to Lauri). Her recipe is a simple mix of berries with a few secret ingredients thrown in.
Lauri Luck
The Dog House Studio
(behind Renga Arts),
#154 in the ARTrails Catalog
2371 Gravenstein Hwy, Sebastopol
la*******@co*****.net
707-477-9442
