Pi(e) day!

March 14th is Pi(e) Day. It's also the birthday of James' brother John, but since we're rarely in New Mexico in March, we tend to celebrate with pie only, rather than pie and birthday cake.

For the uninitiated, who are probably thinking, "US National Pie Day is January 23rd, so I don't know what you're talking about, unless you're telling me that March 14th is French pie day", note the way I've spelled "pie" with parentheses around the "e". Now you know what I'm talking about. Pi(e) Day is March 14th or 3.14, like the number.

My friend Ann, a pie maker extraordinaire, introduced me to this holiday NINE years ago. The tradition has evolved somewhat over the years, and different friends have been brought into the Pi(e) fold, but the core ideals have not changed. You have to eat a lot of different kinds of pie and you have to eat each slice from crust to tip, making a wish on the final bite of each slice. I also like to have pizza or quiche for dinner on Pi(e) day, but that's not really part of the holiday because it's all about eating sweet pies.

Well, Pi(e) Day doesn't work so well in France. For one thing, there is no 3.14 because dates don't go in the month.day format, they're day.month. So for 3.14, you're left with the 3rd day of the 14th month or, if you get a little loosey-goosey with your decimal point, the 31st day of the 4th month -- neither of which exists in the Gregorian calendar. (And even in the French Republican calendar, adopted for about a decade after La Revolution, there were just 12 months of 30 days each with the extra five or six tacked on at the end, so no luck there either!)

Besides that, it's not so easy to find several slices of pie all in one place (even at the tarte-lady's because hers are mostly savory). Most pâtisserie will have one or two sliced tartes (usually an apple and a custard), but in Ann's and my tradition, we need about five different kinds. You'll be able to increase your pie diversity if you buy some individual tartelettes, but these are round and too small to cut into (normal) slices, so you can't eat them from crust to tip and make your wish.

What's a Pi(e) lover to do?

Well, you can improvise, as James and I did. And you can still go on a great hike in Cassis!

Before leaving for our hike, we identified a boulangerie-pâtisserie where there were slices of the requisite apple tarte and custard tarte (although it was chocolate, not plain). They looked ok, but we decided to press on in search of better tartes after the hike. And we were justly rewarded at Sucr'E Délices, where they were extremely friendly and happy to tell us about their desserts and to discuss the fougasse that they had there.

The window was filled with beautiful desserts, unfortunately for my Pi(e) Day quest, mostly of the non-pie variety. As I stood there looking at them, I wondered if I could cut any of them into pie-shaped wedges and call them pie, but they were too un-pie-like, except for the three we got.

Lemon-basil tartelette ...



Orange-cinnamon tartelette ...



Religieuse à la violette ...



Ok, so that last one isn't, strictly speaking, a pie. Une religieuse (or "nun" -- the little choux on top is supposed to be her head) is essentially an eclair of a different shape: choux pastry filled with crème pâtissière and decorated with glaze the flavor of the filling. (They usually come in chocolate or coffee, but this one was violet!) But like I said, we were improvising and it was more like a pie than any of the other wonderful looking desserts in the window (the tartelettes aside). In fact, it turned out to be much more like a pie than any religieuse I have ever eaten because the choux was actually a little salty -- just like a pie crust. So it was perfect.

And here's how they all looked as slices of pie:



The cut-off sides were eaten first, and then the slices of pie from crust to tip.

They were delicious and nuanced and that religieuse was the best non-traditional pie I have ever had on Pi(e) day. Ok, so it's the only non-traditional pie I've had on Pi(e) day, but still. It was an excellent pastry. Its violet crème pâtissière was not at all soapy -- a risk with violet -- and the choux? This choux was not the soggy, bland choux that you eat only because it's the polite way to consume the delicious crème pâtissière that it holds. No, this choux had texture and flavor. Choux never tasted so good, except when fried and dipped in sugar.

But I probably shouldn't be surprised. I learned, when looking for the link to Sucr'E Délices, that one of the co-owners was named pâtissier of the year last year by a famous French food critic and guidebook author.

I will make sure to go there every time we go hiking in Cassis.

And since I feel like I didn't get quite enough pie on Pi(e) Day, I've decided I'm going to celebrate the holiday at least once more this year. I may celebrate on the 118th day (the 365/pi day) of the year, or I may celebrate by taking my first bite of pie at 3:14 on 1.5 (1st of May).

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving dinner this year, was somewhat lesser than in years past. For one thing, we missed good friends in Chicago, who we usually celebrate with. Besides that, James had to go to Paris for a meeting with the Paris lab. However, we celebrated the night before with a traditional Hungarian-Provençal Thanksgiving dish called goulash avec sa garniture de panisse. Didn't know about the Hungary - Provence connection? Well, when I say "traditional" I really mean that the tradition started on Wednesday night.

Panisse is a mixture of chickpea flour, water, olive oil and salt. You cook it, whisking constantly, until it has the consistency of a thick batter, or polenta, and then you pour it into a mold or onto a cookie sheet with sides. Around here, it usually seems to have been poured into a mold that's about the shape of a 14oz. canned-vegetable can. (Sometimes it actually has the rings like the cranberry sauce in a can.) After it cools and solidifies, you unmold it and slice it into rounds (or if you've put it on the cookie sheet, you slice it into french-fry size strips) and fry it in some olive oil until it gets golden brown and crisp on the outside, still creamy on the inside. (Incidentally, there's a similar recipe in the Thanksgiving issue of a cooking magazine from a few years ago that involved cooking the chickpea flour in milk, with a clove of garlic, minced. Milk's not used around here, but it was good like that and the garlic gave it had a really nice flavor.)

As far as tradition is concerned, I can say that the panisse was prepared in the traditional style because I have asked both the lady with the fresh pasta cart at the market and the butcher-charcutier who sell panisse how it's usually prepared. On the other hand, I can't claim that the goulash was a traditional Hungarian goulash that I learned to make when I was in Tab because, in fact, all the gulyás I had in Hungary (and there are many variations) were gulyásleves (gulyas soup), not the thicker stew variety that I made. What I made was more like a bogrács gulyás (kettle gulyas), but I think probably still thicker than any real bogrács gulyás. At least it had real beef shin in it and not ground beef, that would be heresy.

Since we we have no oven, there would be no baking of pies at the Mas de Bonheur. Pie would have to be purchased. But what? A fruit tarte didn't seem exactly right, because I didn't see any that were made from apples or pears -- all berries and tropical fruits. A "pecan pie" or the closest thing, a tarte aux mendiants (dried fruits and mixed nuts), was too risky. Pumpkin pie was nowhere to be seen in the pâtisseries of Aix. In the end, I didn't buy any for our Wednesday night Thanksgiving. We had chocolate.

Still, no Thanksgiving is complete without a slice (or several) of pie, so I bought one for my own Thanksgiving on Thursday (and I ate it the right way: crust to tip). I got a slice of a Corsican tarte called fiadone from the little café around the corner. I really want to work there because it's the kind of café I would want to own with a certain pie-making friend. It's owned and operated by this older lady who makes a lot of savory and a couple of sweet tartes and just a few other dishes. She's open for lunch and through the early evening Monday through Saturday. And she's nice. But back to the fiadone.

I don't have a picture because James had the camera in Paris, but this fiadone was sort of like a cheesecake and a tarte in one. The filling is traditionally made with brocciu (a fresh ewe's milk cheese from Corsica that's kind of like ricotta in texture) or brousse (the Provençal equivalent of brocciu, which can be made from cow, ewe or goat milk), but as the tarte-lady told me, it's too expensive to use on a café scale, so she "does what she can", which means she probably uses ricotta. The filling also has citrus zest (this one had some citron, and that's not French intruding on my English, I mean cédrat) and eau de vie. However she does it, and whether or not it's like a traditional fiadone, it was delicious: the ricotta was sweet and creamy, the bits of citrus and eau de vie gave it depth, and there was the lightest touch of salt from the crust.

Goulash with panisse and fiadone may be my new favorite Thanksgiving traditions. Better when shared with friends, of course.