My friend Tracy asked if I would like to give her granddaughter, Mataya, a lesson in making pies when she came down for some cooking lessons last summer. I, of course, was delighted. I thought I had learned enough since the first pie I baked, in the kitchen of my boyfriend's house in Cambridge fifty years ago, to teach an eleven-year-old child something useful.
We decided to cook at my house and to make one savory pie and one sweet one. I sent Mataya some recipe choices. She picked chicken pot pie and strawberry lime mousse tartlets. She and Tracy would come over mid-morning, and we would eat what we cooked for lunch.
"Pie crusts are tricky.," I told Mataya as we began. "Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't." She was not intimidated.
I explained that it was important to keep the butter cold, to work the butter-and-flour mixture to a uniform consistency, to add very cold (iced) water to the butter-and-flour mixture, and not to overwork the dough.
Mataya moved quickly and with confidence. It wasn't that she didn't listen to me but that she didn't seem to need to know what I was telling her. She whizzed through the process, moving from one step to another without hesitation. The dough was made, divided into four parts, and refrigerated.
While the dough was chilling, we made the crust for the chicken pot pie, then turned to the lime mousse filling for the tartlets. I started to instruct again, talking about the importance of timing and so forth. That's when Mataya told me about the cooking camps she has been to and what she learned there and the variety of things she cooked and how well she had done. I began to think I had nothing at all to teach Mataya. I never took a cooking class. She probably knew stuff I didn't know. I began to see that my role wasn't to teach Mataya anything about baking but simply to give her an opportunity to make some pies.
I knew that Mataya had also taken skiing lessons and had done some rigorous bicycle camp. She told me about going to a computer coding camp earlier in the summer. When I asked which activity she preferred, she said cooking (though maybe now, after another even more exciting bicycle camp, she might have changed her preferences).
While Mataya and I were making the lime mousse filling, Tracy realized we weren't going to get around to cooking the chicken, so she took over that part of the project, chopping celery and carrots and stewing the chicken in its vegetable broth.
I spread my pastry mat on the kitchen counter, anchored it with tape, and brought out the chilled dough, then, unable to leave the teaching mode, started instructing Mataya on how to roll out a pie dough. Full of confidence, she wielded the rolling pin briskly. "Don't push so hard," I suggested. "If you work it too hard, the dough will be tough." Four pastry rounds were cut out and pushed into the tart shells, filled with beans, and put into the oven.
Mataya admitted that she was the kind of cook who made a mess in the kitchen, but she impressed me by being the kind of cook who also immediately cleaned that mess, readying the kitchen for the next step, which, in this case, was to fill the cooled tart shells with the lime mousse, then to decorate the tarts. Mataya cut the strawberries into quarters and stuck them jauntily in a quadrant pattern. The bold red strawberries looked cute on the lime green filling.
The tarts went into the refrigerator and the chicken pot pie into the oven. Tracy, Mataya, and I gave the kitchen a final cleaning and set the table for lunch.
Mataya's pie crusts were excellent. They were not tough. The crust for the chicken pot pie did not turn soggy. The crusts for the tartlets were flaky and perfectly complementary to the sharp citrus flavor of the filling. Mataya talked about how she would adjust the recipe, what she would do different next time. She talked liked a judge on the British Baking Show.
I was impressed with what Mataya had done. In not too many years, I think, I'll have to go to her house for baking lessons.
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