[Susan McLean]

Easy as Pie

It's strange how soon what everyone once knew—
the speed and ease of whipping up a pie—
has turned into a daunting task to do.

Ingredients you need for it are few—
salt, flour, shortening—so you wonder why
the skills were lost that everyone once knew

(well, women mostly, and some men). It's true
the steps, though few, can often go awry.
Dough turns to cardboard if you overdo

the mixing, clings to countertops like goo
if it's too wet, and falls apart if dry.
But flaky pie, as everyone once knew,

is worth some time and training to pursue,
and puts to shame the sludgy kind you buy.
As fabled as the fare in Xanadu,

great pie is now a culinary coup.
How can an art so appetizing die?
It's strange how soon what everyone once knew
has turned into a daunting task to do.

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Susan—

Very nice villanelle. Creative repetends! (I especially like the Xanadu line.)
I always thought that the expression “easy as pie” referred to the eating rather than the baking, as when we describe something easy as “a piece of cake.” I seem to remember reading that the ability to make a dependably flaky pie crust was an accomplishment that made a young woman particularly attractive to prospective husbands, suggesting an awareness of the difficulty of the task. In any case, I enjoyed the poem.

Glenn

[Susan McLean]

Glenn, everything is easy to eat. I remember puzzling over the phrase "easy as pie," but thinking of my mother and grandmother (both superb pie makers), I realized that once you know certain techniques, you can make good pie crust in minutes. My grandmother showed me how to do it. But most people are not getting that personal training from a relative anymore. I'm glad you enjoyed the villanelle. I had fun with the repetend variations.

Susan

[Roger Slater]

I like this overall. And I agree with you completely that it's not at all difficult to make a delicious pie crust on your own. I've only made a few, but they turned out perfectly, thanks to guidance on YouTube. There's not much to it at all.

My global comment on the poem is that perhaps there's not enough at stake. You never seem to take us beyond lamenting that people seem to overstate the difficulty of making their own pies, but it's actually easy and the pies are better for it. I guess that's enough in a light verse sense, but to me this feels like a vaguely concealed metaphor or observation that can extend beyond pie-dom. If you don't want to go there, then I'd like the poem to be funnier, or to acknowledge there are bigger things to worry about. If you could somehow give us something like a turn in the last strophe, rather than simply repeating your complaint that people don't bake enough pies from scratch, it would have more of a sense of completion and closure.

More comments between the lines.

Originally Posted by Susan McLean

Easy as Pie

It's strange how soon what everyone once knew— I wonder if "soon" is the right word? It seems to suggest that one would have expected it to happen at some time in the future, but it's strange that it didn't take longer to occur. But of course that's not what you mean. I think you mean something more like "lately."
the speed and ease of whipping up a pie— Maybe replace "whipping," since the slang meaning derives from a food metaphor that doesn't apply to pies, i.e., there's no whipping involved with making a pie crust.
has turned into a daunting task to do. The phrase "task to do" seems a bit redundant. But for the rhyme, you could have put the period after "task" without loss of meaning.

Ingredients you need for it are few—
salt, flour, shortening—so you wonder why I could be wrong, but I think the vast majority of home bakers who make pie crusts would also use butter. In fact, some bakers leave out the shortening. But most use little lumps of frozen butter for the flavor, and also for the way they melt away in the oven and leave air holes that are considered desirable. It's true, though, that you don't "need" butter and you can do it with shortening alone (or, if you're old fashioned, lard).
the skills were lost that everyone once knew Maybe "the skill was...." since we're talking specifically about pie making.

(well, women mostly, and some men). It's true
the steps, though few, can often go awry.
Dough turns to cardboard if you overdo

the mixing, clings to countertops like goo Do you mean "glue"?
if it's too wet, and falls apart if dry.
But flaky pie, as everyone once knew,

is worth some time and training to pursue,
and puts to shame the sludgy kind you buy. (These days, at least where I live, there are many places to buy excellent pies, including bakeries and grocery stores and farm stands. But I understand you mean commercially packaged pies rather than chef baked).
As fabled as the fare in Xanadu, Coleridge's Xanadu doesn't mention food until the last two lines, when honey-dew and the milk of Paradise are mentioned. Are there other famous accounts of Xanadu that delve into the fare?

great pie is now a culinary coup.
How can an art so appetizing die? I think you may be overstating things here, since great pie is still not reserved for Michelin starred restaurants, and the art has not died even if fewer home cooks practice it.
It's strange how soon what everyone once knew
has turned into a daunting task to do.

[Max Goodman]

The subtext is that we're losing all sorts of skills we used to have. I wonder if that could be made clearer and given more weight, possibly by dwelling more on the loss, the differences between those home-made pies and the things that have replaced them.

[Susan McLean]

Roger, what I am saying is not so much "people should make their own pies more often" but "it's easy to lose skills we once had, ones that are worth keeping." Though I don't go into why those skills were lost, I think I know the culprits. I blame the focus on convenience: ready-made foods, fast food restaurants, anything that is quick, cheap, and simple. I used "soon" to imply that in three generations we have gone from a society in which many people knew how to make a good pie to one in which very few can manage it. Even though most people would like to eat good pies, they settle for disappointing ones, and sometimes don't even know the difference. "Whipping up" something is used for all kinds of actions that don't involve beating anything. Butter and lard are also shortening; they just aren't vegetable shortening. I use butter. There is more than one skill that goes into making a pie. I was trying to avoid the cliché of "clings like glue" by using "goo," which is also sticky. Coleridge implies that the fare in Xanadu had associations with paradise, so I thought that was sufficient to call it "fabled." I'm not really trying to be funny. Instead, I am exploring the irony that "easy as pie" is still a common phrase, even though few people know how to make a pie, and most consider it difficult to make. I don't see that as being likely to change in the future.

Max, I don't know how to further emphasize the difference between homemade pie and the kind of pie most people eat most of the time. Even a lot of people who make pie at home use packaged crust to make it.

Susan

[Alessio Boni]

Hi Susan,

I like the simple theme of this poem, and the poem is as simple as is the theme (in a good way) thus giving it a plain right of mocking the title.

The references to Coleridge's Milk of Paradise being used as a false criteria of supposedly 'paradisiacal' foods was creative and I liked it! As you explained in your reply to Roger, the reference is quite reasonable even though at first I was as confused as he was in the correlation.

Maybe instead of 'fare' you could use a word to indicate a more generic (falsely) high standard of food instead of an actual event, that way it could be more correct towards Coleridge's reference of treating such types as the divine.

"As fabled as the/those types in Xanadu" --- maybe?

or

"As fabled as the milk of Xanadu."

To be completely honest though these corrections are kind of trivial, and the poem would still be good either way. (In my opinion)

Cheers,

Alessio

[Matt Q]

Hi Susan,

I had a similar reaction to Roger, regarding there not seeming to be much at stake here. I looked for more than a lament about the decline of pie-making, but didn't really find it. I guess this can be generalised to other cultural losses, and I read in your comment that this was your intention, but that didn't really come across to me in the poem.

Also like Roger, I hadn't consider the cuisine of the Mongols/Kubla Khan to be particularly fabled. And in the last line of Kubla Khan, is the "milk of paradise" a reference to actual milk? I hadn't taken it to be such, though I could easily be wrong. If it was, then presumably it would have been fermented mare's milk, of which the Mongols were very fond. And, perhaps somewhere modern Mongolians are lamenting the fact that no one takes the time to milk a mare and ferment the milk themselves anymore Anyway, consequently "Xanadu" stuck out a bit and struck me as somewhat rhyme-driven (which isn't it say it was, but that's how it seemed to me when I read the poem). I wondered if maybe this line could be used to compare to some other thing that used to be commonly hand or home made but no longer is, which might help suggest the generalisation you want.

Best,
Matt

[Jim Moonan]

.
I beg to differ. It may be that your memory colors the reality of the art of making a pie. Making a pie is not easy. In fact, the term "easy as pie" could be a reflection of how some things that would appear to be easy are in fact difficult to do well.

In S1, you give the impression that pie-making is an easy task that requires few ingredients and can be "whipped" up in no time. But in S3/4 your story changes to reveal that it is not, in fact, so easy to make a pie. It is a delicate undertaking and any flaw in the process can be unforgiving. I love to bake but have never made a good pie. In truth, the art of pie-making lies in making the pie shell/crust.

Anyone who has learned the art of making a pie will tell you it takes practice to get it right. One must be both patient and quick. Patient in letting the dough chill to just the right working temperature. Quickness in rolling the chilled dough into the perfect thickness and size before it loses its delicate state of relaxed chillness.

Your poem brought back memories of my own. I worked in a bakery summers when I was in college. Best job I ever had. It was a Jersey shore bakery that made a killing during the summer months of the year and then shut down in the off-season. Us semi-skilled college students took care of of the more mundane baking tasks: doughnuts, breads, sticky buns, etc. but the pies, pastries and cakes were off-limits to us summer hacks. That was the job of a professional baker. He worked in his own section of the bakery, spoke little English (he was old world Eastern European) and rarely acknowledged the group of bakery hacks. People drove from all over the island to get one of his pies.

The transcendence in your poem wants to come from the realization that the memory is its own reality. But as is, it is a well-executed villanelle that spins its wheels trying to make a point.
I think there's something you're overlooking in rolling out this piem : )


.

[Roger Slater]

Jim, have you ever made a pie crust from scratch? It is truly easy, and certainly easer than baking a typical cake. Yes, of course there are ways you can mess it up, but it's easy to avoid the pitfalls and it takes no skill. The mixing is accomplished in under ten minutes. The hardest part is rolling it out into circles, but that's also not particularly hard. Just find a good recipe/video and they'll walk you through it. (Basically, just add the water very, very slowly, perhaps just a tablespoon at a time, until the dough just starts to hold together when you squeeze it).

Now back to Susan's poem. Susan, I like Alessio's suggestion of "As fabled as the milk of Xanadu."