Addendum: Marshallese Pie Recipe
Have a slice. You earned it.
If you read all the way to the bottom of yesterday’s long missive on the Marshall Islands, you may have seen that I promised an accompanying pie recipe. Here it is. Like all my pies it didn’t turn out quite how I expected it to; like all my pies this was both a strike against it and a point in its favor.
I should preface this by saying this is not any kind of authentic Marshallese pie recipe, just one inspired by my time there. The sheer amount of cream in this thing would rule it out—on the outer islands like Aur, where I lived, there’s no refrigeration, and therefore no dairy. (That would also make the whole finnicky cold dough thing a problem.) They do have eggs, lep, which are tiny and come from tiny chickens that feed strictly on bugs and discarded cocounts, so I have that going for me.
As far as I know you can’t buy sea turtle eggs anywhere in the United States but I confess a morbid curiosity about how they’d hold up in a pie recipe.
Luckily for me a few of the fruits I ate most often during my time in the Marshall Islands are readily available in American grocery stores—bananas, coconuts, and limes. Here the differences are of degree, not of kind: the bananas on Aur were called pinana jilubuki (three hundred bananas) because they were tiny and a ton of them grew on each bunch; they were richer and sweeter than our Cavendish variety, sort of like how banana bread smells and tastes. The ripe coconuts there were green and fresh and totally alien to my conception of a hard brown sphere with firm white flesh. (The limes were just limes.)
I found a recipe that combined all three of those flavors into one cream pie, and I basically did not tinker with it except when my own errors and equipment shortcomings forced me to call an audible or two.
First, the crust, Imperial Sugar’s “Pure Butter” variety:
I was hesitant to break from my usual crust option (which incorporates both butter and lard) but I was curious about how buttermilk and sugar would change the flavor and texture, so I rolled with it. (If you feel like trying this at home, I should note that after the 1/4 cup of buttermilk I did need to slowly add in another 1/4 cup of cold water before the dough would come together. I also only have a hand mixer and no paddle attachment, so I was attacking it with one spiral attachment rather than the recommended option here.)
Despite all the pies I make I have yet to master the art of rolling out my crust in such a way as to prevent it from looking like a Rorshach blot. I’ve tried several methods I’ve found in recipe books but none have worked for me, which makes me wonder if it’s my dough itself that’s the problem. Alas. I slid this crust into a tart tin (my first time using one) and tried to take the lopsided bits off and stick them back into other places where the shape was lacking.
You can see the patchwork job here. I was gonna say “ugly stuff” but honestly who cares, it’s not like I’m selling it.
Ok admittedly that does not look great.
(Something else I forget like 70% of the time I make a pie is that you really need to go much wider than than your tin and then fold & crimp the excess back onto the crust so that it doesn’t pull itself toward the middle like this. Also I need like 3x as many pie weights as I have. Jeffy from Family Circus-ass crust.)
The pie recipe itself also comes from Imperial Sugar:
If you’ve ever watched The Great British Baking Show, you know that step 3, “be careful not to scramble them,” is often a tall task for incredibly talented bakers, not just jerks who do it from time to time out of hardheaded aesthetic commitment. So even with the heat on low I managed to start scrambling my filling at that stage. I took it quickly off the heat and was somehow able to beat it back into shape, or what felt enough like it to satisfy me, before combining it with the lime and butter.
(My friend Scott over at the Action Cookbook newsletter has a theory that everyone, inside or outside the kitchen, is basically either a baker—precise, patient, and prudent—or a cook—improvisational, unbound by rules, and maybe not particularly detail-oriented. I am absolutely a cook in this dichotomy, and I’m unsure exactly why I try to bake so many pies despite my clear lack of the temperament for it.)
Here the recipe makes it seem like you should make your whipped cream before putting the pie in the fridge to set, but I layered my bananas and poured my lukewarm filling in without bothering to do that, and made the whipped cream after the pie had been setting for about 5 hours.
The final step here—the “Marshallese” part of this pie—was to make a topper inspired by my time there. Marshallese women make amimono, handicrafts, from cowrie shells and dried palm fronds; the attention to detail is breathtaking and I have a half-dozen amimono wall-hangings and necklaces up around my apartment. I wanted my pie to look like my biggest wall hanging, so I made a stencil by tracing the interior of it.
This, too, was an exercise in humility. I rolled this dough out very thin and had to do some hasty repairs by crimping pieces together with a fork.
Despite all that it held together better than I could have possibly dreamed after 18 minutes at 350.
I topped my set & whipped pie with it, and the results are below
In my haste to eat this pie I completely forgot to top it with the toasted shredded coconut that the recipe called for until after I had already done a whole photoshoot and cut my first slice. You can see that result below, along with some other process pics.
The final result here—looks notwithstanding, a caveat that has served me well in this life—was actually very good. The pie was sweet without being cloying (which banana stuff can sometimes be) and the flaky all-butter crust made a great complement to the dense, rich flavors contained within. To this day I have no idea how to make homemade whipped cream look good on a dish, nor what “stiff peaks” actually are, but that seemed to go okay too.
Thanks for coming along on this pie journey with me, and, as always, for reading these lengthy screeds.
I’ll talk to you next week!
-Chuck
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Karen always calls winter "Pie Season" so we're gonna try it and go out with a bang. Thanks for posting it.