Charoset pie

When it comes to cooking there seems to be a magic threshhold that some people can cross, and others cannot, or perhaps it's not a threshhold but an entirely different psychic room, which some cooks simply are not interested in, while others see it and explore it naturally right away. I'm talking about the ability to move beyond following a recipe, or even whipping up a basic "something" having learned a basic technique -- a filled omelet is a filled omelet -- to venture into the realms of inventing a new dish. Grant Achatz, chef at Alinea, famously recreated the peanut butter and jelly sandwich as an appetizer involving a peeled, baked grape and a breath of peanut butter wrapped in some sort of lacy toast and served, two grapes to a plucked bunch, in a futuristic wire cage (see the article by Pete Wells from a back issue of Food & Wine).

Of course, in turning to Grant Achatz as an example, we are turning instantly to an entirely different level of kitchen functionality you might say. Sheer genius? Food writers seem to agree. For somewhat lesser souls, it may be the combination of natural inclination and culinary school that helps thrust them over the threshhold, or into that other psychic room, where invention replaces mere (if happy) instruction-following. As a home cook, I can safely attest I have never created a really worthwhile new dish. I've tried, oh, every five or six years or so. There is just always something missing. Have you ever seen a celebrity wearing a dress of her own design? It's like that. Look twice, and you can just tell. She is likely wearing a block of fabric with some sort of detail that she considers daring: a neckline, a gather. She doesn't know the fundamentals of creation in this particular art. Maybe, apart from novelty's occasional charms, she is fundamentally not interested in this particular art, that psychic room, which after all is fine.

All this leads to charoset pie, my most recent attempt to create something new. Charoset is one of the ceremonial foods eaten at the Passover seder. It's a free-form mix of apples, raisins, nuts, dates, cinnamon, and wine, and represents the mortar used by the ancient Hebrew slaves in building Pharaoh's cities and monuments. It also seems to be a carryover from the real dining habits of the ancient Romans -- the seder goes back a very long way, and let us not forget that the Jews were a most visible minority in the empire -- who liked to begin dinner with mixed vegetable and fruit relishes like this one. It is the tastiest thing on the seder plate, but unhappily every year, after a few mouthfuls, the remaining cup or cup and a half of it goes to waste. What to do? This year, I had a brain wave (as the characters in Mapp and Lucia always say when they are "being psychical" over a rubber of bridge). Why not treat leftover charoset as a pie filling?

I used a basic recipe for pecan pie, from Marion Cunningham's 1986 Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Her filling is made with 3 eggs, 3/4 cup sugar, 1/8 teaspoon salt, 1 cup dark corn syrup, and 1 teaspoon vanilla. (As you see it's very sweet.) To this, you add 1 cup broken pecan nutmeats. I substituted about 1 and 1/2 cups of my leftover charoset. It all went into a pre-made pie shell, which in itself is not kosher for Passover; a more observant baker would want to create a pie crust without chametz (without leavening of any kind, since Passover is the feast of unleavened bread).

I baked the pie, per the cookbook instructions, at 425 F for 10 minutes, and then finished baking it at 350 F for about 40 minutes, until the filling set. As a culinary student would probably know, as Chef Achatz would have foreseen, strange things happened to it. The apples floated to the top of the pie and gave off a lot of water, which made the corn syrup filling unpleasantly soft. The crust turned too brown. There weren't enough nuts to give it crunch. But, by golly, the kids ate the whole pie over a couple of days -- did I mention it is very sweet? -- and so I accomplished my purpose. This year's charoset did not go to waste. "Next year, in" ... well, not in Jerusalem. Next year in culinary school?

Could there possibly be a wine to serve with it? A Sercial Madeira once accompanied Alinea's "pbj." Naturally -- this is the driest and lightest Madeira, made from the Sercial grape, and is a rare wine today (rare enough to yet show up on exclusive restaurants' wine lists), because so many Sercial vines on the island of Madeira were destroyed by the parasite phylloxera in the 1870s. According to the Wine Lover's Companion, much of Madeira's land was subsequently planted with a lesser madeira-making grape, the Tinto Negro Mole. It has only been since the 1990s that the classic Sercial has begun to make a comeback, in acres planted and in wine made. Because European laws require that any wine labeled with a grape variety must include 85 per cent of that grape in the bottle, madeira makers have an incentive to plant and make true Sercial Madeira, as opposed to a "Sercial-style," inferior grape product. As it happens I can go to my big, local discount liquor store, only a forty-five minute drive one way, and find there a wine called a "Charleston Sercial Madeira" -- the real thing? -- for about $43 a bottle or about $500 a case. So even this is rather dear.

In lieu thereof, I can also try a glass of inexpensive grocery store pinot noir, whose acidity and fruit I find go rather well with a number of desserts. Especially apple pie.