Blackberries and Pie Again

Blackberries and Pie Again

This is a new version of what I wrote in my blog during another summer several years ago when it was blackberry season.  The first line below applied then and today.

I picked wild blackberries this morning and made some of them into a pie. It’s the beginning of the wild blackberry season in Madison.

Pie is a wonderful part of Americana. For me, it is the all American dessert. When it’s good, it’s very, very good, and when it’s bad, it’s horrid. I make very good pie. Many grocery stores make very bad pie. Grocery store pies often have mass produced crusts that are not flaky and taste like straw. Since I believe that pies are more than fillings stuffed between soft cement crusts, I prefer to eat pies that I make.

My great aunt Lina used to make pie crust that was like hard cement; she mixed it too much. Needless to say, she didn’t teach me how to make pies. My mother did give a few pointers, although I actually never saw her make a pie. She gave me an important bit of advice, which I have followed with good results. She said not to mix the dough very much. My pie crust is flaky and delicious. Thanks, Mother.

My blackberry pie recipe is derived from my big fat falling-apart Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book, 1953 edition, for the crust, and adapted from a pie recipe on the box of Minute Tapioca, for the filling. The tapioca box doesn’t say how to make blackberry pie. It says how to make blueberry pie. Close enough. Since my cooking interest is in how to cook for one or two people, I cut the tapioca box recipe in half to make an eight-inch pie. If your kitchen does not have an eight-inch pie plate, you are likely to find one at a thrift store. Ditto for rolling pin.

Blackberry Pie – one eight-inch pie

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2 cups fresh blackberries

½ cup sugar

2 tablespoons quick cooking tapioca

Mix fruit, tapioca and sugar in bowl. Let stand 15 minutes. Make an 8-inch pie crust while waiting. Use your recipe or the one here.

1 ½ cups all purpose flour (of course I think it is bad for us, but it makes good pie)

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup lard, butter or shortening; I use lard (I’ll have more to say about this later)

4 tablespoons cold water (approximately)

Stir together the flour and salt. Cut in the lard or other fat until pieces are the size of peas.  Sprinkle water, a tablespoon at a time, over the mixture. Gently mix with fork until all is moistened. Don’t mix too much. Form the mixture into a ball. Divide it in half. Flatten the first half slightly and roll it on a lightly floured pastry cloth or floured sheet of waxed paper. Roll the dough with light strokes, from center of the piece to the edges, so it makes a circle of dough about the size of the pie plate. Put the dough into the pie dish. I fold half over the other half, pick it up carefully and put it in the dish, and then unfold it.

Put berry/tapioca mixture into the pie plate on the bottom crust. Dot it with butter.  Moisten the peripheral edges of the bottom crust with water, all the way around. Roll the second half of the crust dough into a circle that will fit onto the pie plate. Seal the edges with fork or Fluting. I use a fork. Consult your cookbook to flute edges. Cut vent holes in crust with fork.  Bake the pie in a pre-heated oven at 400 degrees, for 45 or more minutes, until it is brown and done. If juices escape and drip onto your oven floor during baking, resign yourself. It’s still a good pie. You can put a cookie sheet under the pie dish to catch juices. I baked my pie in the toaster oven, so that option was not available.

Comment about fat:  fat is a big issue these days, but pie requires it. I think lard makes wonderful crust, but good lard is hard to find. The lard in the big box grocery stores is partly hydrogenated and not recommended unless you don’t care about your health. I can buy pasture raised, minimally processed local lard, frozen, at the Willy Street Coop (Madison and Middleton), which is the only place I have seen it. Lard contains cholesterol.  I don’t believe that cholesterol is bad for people, but that is another story. If good lard is not available, I recommend butter. A third choice is vegetable shortening, preferably not hydrogenated, although it does not lend flavor to the crust the way lard and butter do.  Purchased pie crust is available in grocery stores, and it is all right, but in my opinion, it lacks the character of homemade crust. I don’t know what extra ingredients are in it, such as chemicals and flavorings.

Two Kinds of People in the World

There’s Two Kinds of People in the World...

DORI BECKER·WEDNESDAY, JULY 12, 2017

This is a guest blog post by my daughter.

At the library today, we were talking about one parent’s reaction to a book whose presence in school and public libraries is frequently challenged. Banning/challenging books is one of those behaviors that gets me thinking about human nature. There are as many different ways to split us up into two camps as there are people to split up, but this one has been much on my mind lately.

When something makes people uncomfortable, they either examine their reaction or they push the irritant away. ‘Why does this make me uncomfortable’ vs ‘I don’t like it make it go away.’ This isn’t just about art, of course, it happens with any sort of idea and in many different contexts. Another version, one which is on display all over our public discourse at the moment, goes like this: when presented with information that challenges their world view, some people will re-examine their world view in light of the new information, and some will reject, deny, or attempt to discredit the new information.

People in the first group tend to respond to people in the second group by throwing more facts at them, and then fail to understand why that doesn’t change their minds. When people are clinging to a belief, opinion, position, whatever, in defiance of the facts, more facts are only going to make them more defensive. Being able to ‘prove’ that they’re ‘wrong’ doesn’t prove anything to them except that the person with the ‘proof’ is their enemy and must be stopped, condemned, ridiculed, or ignored.

We’ve all experienced cognitive dissonance. You learn something that contradicts something you’ve already incorporated into your version of reality. To pull a handy example or two from my own life: you find out that your spouse is lying to you, systematically and habitually. I willfully looked away and pretended not to know, because I could not handle the implications, and it took several years to fully integrate that truth into what I thought I had known about my marriage. Another: you find out someone you like, admire, consider a friend, is abusing his/her partner/spouse. This has happened to me a couple of times, and I understand why some people just withdraw from situations like that rather than give the abused person the support they need. I don’t condone it, but I understand. It’s hard to face and accept the fact that someone who has always seemed like a decent person can be false and cruel.

It’s hard to accept that things you believe to be true might not be, and people that you believed were going to do the right thing, aren’t. It’s easier for some people to pretend that whoever is challenging their belief is wrong, malicious, or misguided. Sometimes, even when the truth is right in front of you, it’s easier to look away.

Here’s the thing - most of us spend time in both camps. Most of us can be flexible and adaptable about some things, and blindly rigid about others. Perhaps when we’re dealing with someone who is on the opposite side of this divide from us, it might behoove us to remember the times when we were being that way, ourselves -- if we’re actually interested in bridging the divide rather than just satisfying ourselves that we’re right and they’re irrelevant. Trying to shout each other down is getting us nowhere, and ignoring the other side until they go away isn’t much of a strategy, either. I’m not saying that those reactions aren’t justified - I don’t care if they’re justified. I care if they’re effective.

If something makes you uncomfortable, sometimes you just have to learn to live with discomfort. Some cognitive dissonances don’t ever resolve. Some people are nice to their friends and assholes to their family. Some ideas are scary. Some works of art are disturbing. Some arguments can’t be won, at least not by arguing.

Washington Island Forum 2017

“Remember matrix,” John Dominic Crossan told an audience of more than two hundred people at the Washington Island Forum that ended Friday. Matrix, he said, is the key to the consequence and punishment traditions in the Hebrew Bible. Matrix was one thread that went through three and a half days of lecture and discussion; another was distributive justice. The forum’s attendees comprised about ninety percent clergy representing many Christian denominations, and some laypeople including me. Crossan is professor emeritus in Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago.

We were given a boatload of big words during the week. Matrix, distributive justice, Deuteronomic, eschatology, and more. Matrix, the first, was defined as common sense of time and space, or what everyone else knows. He said that to know the matrix is to know what is going on throughout the Bible. Once one knows the matrix, questions become possible. The matrix he presented included tradition, vision, time and place. He began with Adam and Eve and went through eight great traditions that are likely to be more familiar to clergy than to ordinary people like me.

Crossan talked about Adam and Eve, with the question of deciding to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and pointed out another tradition, the Mesopotamian story, which gave the first couple the choice of eating from the tree of immortality and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He said that people see the Adam and Eve story as about original sin and sex. Then he pointed out that many people stop with the first couple and sex rather than talk about Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. Cain and Abel gave us the beginning of escalatory violence, which continues in history to today. Cain and Abel were the farmer and the herder. It was the beginning of civilization, which he said wasn’t always very good.

Sabbath was shown as the crown of creation. Human beings are the result of creation, not the crown. Crossan said that females and males were created in the image of God to run the world for God as agents or stewards, with no hint about covenant, sanction, punishments and rewards. This began the consequence tradition. The Sabbath God in Torah is about distributive justice. Distributive justice is primary. Sabbath is the metronome of time; even the land and wild animals rest. Sabbath sets up the rhythm of distributive, not punitive, justice.

Non-violent resistance was another theme of the talks. Crossan talked about covenantal law with rewards and punishments as a deuteronomic idea that comes up in the Bible in many circumstances. Israel was situated between two superpowers who fought wars.

And so the story of Israel in the Hebrew Bible continued. God was the householder of the world house, with everyone getting a fair share, and their rights to enough were taken for granted. The radicality of God was contrasted with civilization, with God’s radicality affirmed and subverted repeatedly through time.

Crossan talked about prophetic and psalm traditions, which he said are repeatedly about distributive justice and group identity; Sabbath means everyone gets a fair share. Amos is about divine distributive justice; Amos said you will be destroyed if you don’t do distributive justice.

People made a mess of things, and the idea of atonement came up. Crossan talked about sacrificial atonement, to be good for fixing up your mess. He said that the idea of substitutionary sacrificial atonement is not in the New Testament. He favored participatory sacrificial atonement. Sacrifice means to make sacred. With elaboration that I am not including, he said that Jesus is about sacrificial atonement but not substitution. Without the matrix the sacrifice of Jesus makes no sense.

He pointed out that in baptism the person is dying to Roman values and born into the Christian world, dying with Christ. Grace, he said, is the free download of God’s character. He mentioned the kingdom of God as being among the people in the present, and it was to be realized through non-violent resistance.

We heard about the Book of Daniel, which switches into the eschatological tradition. Eschatology refers to the end or the last things, not the end of the world. Daniel has three empires with exponential increases in weaponry; the fifth kingdom/empire is the Kingdom of God. Rome called itself the fifth kingdom. Rome and the God kingdom were in an eschatological collision course. Rome vs the Kingdom of God was peace through victory vs peace through justice. The Kingdom of God was human-like, not beast-like. It was not armed revolt.

In the last talk Crossan talked about Jesus. He said that resurrection is all of humanity, a rising. Jesus in the Easter vision never rises alone (in art). The original vision of Easter is that the people who have been raised should be leading risen lives. The descent of Jesus into hell in the western tradition is going in the wrong direction; victory is raising up. Escalatory violence is our sin. The crucified one liberates us from death, not hell. Crossan said that there are two visions of Jesus, riding triumphantly on a donkey, and in Revelation riding on a war horse. He said that Jesus on a war horse is a failure of the Incarnation, getting there riding through blood. The Gospel Jesus is not the apocalyptic Jesus.

Crossan’s final message is if we separate justice and love, it goes wrong. Don’t separate them. Justice is the flesh of love and love is the spirit of justice.

The forum was held at Washington Island, Wisconsin, June 26-30, 2017, and was sponsored by the Wisconsin Council of Churches and Christian Century magazine. The talks were based on Crossan’s recent book, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian.