How mothers and grandmothers inspire our love of pie
~ This is the second of a 2-part pie series ~
I grew up eating homemade pies. My grandmother made them with chunks of apples, sweetened with granulated sugar, dusted with cinnamon and nutmeg, suspended in translucent, tapioca-thickened juice and heaped generously into the bottom crust. Her thick and voluptuous top crust was draped over the hilly mounds of apples and finished with a fork-crimped edge. Juices bubbled out from the steam vents cut into the crust (bleached white flour, salt, sugar and Crisco), making a shiny glaze where they emerged.
Grandma’s pies were robust, spontaneously concocted, and hearty enough for the big eaters around her dining room table on Sunday nights.
My mother’s pies were more refined. The apples were evenly sliced, neatly placed in the bottom crust and dotted with bits of butter. For her dough, she used margarine or Crisco, cut into white flour, and some salt. She experimented with recipes from magazines and newspapers, used tools to create uniform strips and carefully crimped edges. Her apples had brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg seasonings, sometimes a nutty crumble on top, and were symmetrical and perfectly browned. Although she made fruit pies on request, her favorite was a tooth-aching pecan pie with its crusty brittle of solid pecans topping a dark, Karo syrup custard (recipe on bottle).
Both grandma and mom used a canvas pastry cloth and wooden rolling pin, dusted with flour. Mom later turned to rolling the crust between two sheets of wax paper but ultimately the pastry cloth won out as the method that worked the best. Mom’s rolling pin, the heavy cylinder of wood with handles on the ends, had its own little cotton knit sleeve. Grandma used a naked well-seasoned narrow dowel, tapered on each end.
I feel connected to my mother and grandmother when I make pies, using grandma’s rolling pin and pastry cloth, and mom’s pastry cutter, its green handle holding together the wire parabolas to form the dough. These homemade pies are the standard by which I compare all other pies. I recently discovered their delicious counterpart in the pies of Dominique’s Sweets.
Dominique Cortara’s Influences
Although Dominique Cortara formally trained in cooking, baking, sugar and chocolate at the Cordon Bleu culinary school in Paris, earning a Grand Diplôme, she also grew up on homemade pies. She first learned to bake in the kitchen of her Portuguese grandmother, Maria Julia Rocha, as a child in San Rafael.
I fell in love with Dominique’s pies when I stopped by the Sebastopol Farmers’ Market on a Sunday morning, fresh from an exercise class and ready for a baked treat for breakfast to replace my lost calories. Her pies, galettes and savory puff pastries not only looked enticing and authentically homemade but proved to be delicious, a refined and satisfying celebration of local organic produce and a continuation of family tradition.
“If you wanted to hang out with grandma, you had to follow her around – she was always in the garden or in the kitchen,” Dominique told me. She was permitted to assist with the Thanksgiving pies – pumpkin, lemon meringue, banana cream, pecan, peach and berry pies; but, she said, “I wasn’t allowed to do the important part, the crust, until I was 12 or so. My grandma taught me to cook the hard way, lots of criticism. She’d always say ‘you’re touching it too much.’
“My grandmother is still my inspiration. She always wanted to be a businesswoman, but she wasn’t even allowed to go to high school. Although she’s not here anymore, I still talk to her and she actually does help me a lot.” Dominique, in turn, wanted to inspire her son, now 28, when he was growing up, telling him, “You should always do something you like to do.” This encouragement was reciprocated when she was ready to make a life change, and her son declared, “Mom, you should sell pies for a living.”
Leaving a job as an office manager for a CPA firm and knowing she wanted to start her own pastry business, but not necessarily work in a restaurant, she took a 10-week course with the Women’s Initiative for Self Employment, an organization that encourages and celebrates women in business. It was great for growing her self-confidence. She put together a business plan and started Dominique’s Sweets in 2008, baking pies for parties and selling uniquely flavored French macarons at farmers’ markets for the exposure.
From Peach to Pecan
I watched her in action on a Thursday at Tierra Vegetables’ commercial kitchen in the Shiloh Business Park in Windsor, where she was baking lattice-crusted peach pies and rustic apple pies (a Gravenstein/Pink Pearl combo), eight at a time. With two assistants, she prepared dough and fillings for galettes and pasties in a separate, cooler pantry area, simultaneously sharing the busy, crowded space that day with a pizza caterer and a tempeh manufacturer. Her goal was 150 9-inch pies and 75 6-inch pies to sell at the Heirloom Festival, in addition to a variety of pastries for her regular weekend farmers’ market schedule.
Dominique usually bakes 20 hours each week for the markets: Friday in St. Helena, Saturday at Santa Rosa’s Wells Fargo Center Market and Sunday in Sebastopol, where I first tasted her mini apple tart, a tender fluted cup of all-butter pastry glazed with just-sweet-enough syrup from the organic apple filling, seasoned with hints of cinnamon and clove. On another visit I discovered the pissaladière, a melt-in-your-mouth, savory puff-pastry topped with caramelized onion, olive and anchovy.
Dominique makes her dough from Central Milling Co. unbleached white flour, Clover salted butter and a pinch of salt; the fillings are as local and organic as she can get them, purchased from farmers’ market vendors. Meat pasties are filled with lamb from Williams Ranch, beef from Longmeadow Ranch in St. Helena combined with eggs, potatoes and carrots from Armstrong Valley Farm. Veggie pasties are filled with potatoes, sautéed with garlic and either mushrooms or Swiss chard.
Peaches come from Dry Creek Peach & Produce, apples from DeVoto Gardens, strawberries from Preston Farm, and rhubarb and strawberries from Tierra. She picks wild blackberries herself and earned a Gold Medal in the 2011 Harvest Fair, professional category, for her wild blackberry pie.
You can order Thanksgiving pies from Dominique until November 24 and pick them up the Wednesday before Thanksgiving day at the Santa Rosa Farmers Market. Choose from pumpkin, pecan with bourbon and brown sugar, apple, lemon meringue and sweet potato pies – or get one of each!
Dominique’s Sweets
707-843-9765
Do*******@do*************.com
