Getting Down with Pie and Jazz

It's Thanksgiving, the dinner has been eaten, and the dishes are soaking. It's been a quiet holiday, but as Thanksgivings go, I've seen worse, I promise. One of the best things about today was the mild and sunny weather, a nice departure from the typical drab-and-overcast Thanksgivings we usually see around here.

Over the last couple of weeks, the trees have been slowly shedding their leaves, and the fall colors have faded into a landscape of dun, charcoal, and dull green. Earlier in the week, a red or yellow tree here or there stood out like a beacon in a world of brown; now even those outliers have subsided into leaflessness. But when I sat outside for a few minutes this afternoon, drawn by the sun, I was looking at a blue sky through all those bare branches, and all in all, it was a pretty fair view. I don't know that I've ever sunbathed on Thanksgiving before--I wouldn't mind doing it more often.

I spent this past week cleaning and getting ready. Last Friday, it was shopping; Saturday and Sunday, it was cleaning and dusting. Monday I vacuumed and mopped the floors; Tuesday I did the laundry and made iced tea. Yesterday, I made pie crust, and finally, the piece de resistance, my Thanksgiving pie. I usually make Thanksgiving dessert ahead of time, and this year was no exception, but the dilemma of what to make preoccupied me for several days. It was probably the only thing I really had to think about, since I'd already decided on the potato recipe from last year that was so good with bay leaves and olive oil, the homemade cranberry relish, and some old standbys from years past.

I'm of the persuasion that thinks you ought to have pie (as opposed to cake or something else) for Thanksgiving. The question was, what kind? I've gone off pumpkin pie, which I used to like; I considered a chocolate pie, but in the end, it just didn't seem "Thanksgiving" enough. I've already had plenty of apples, it isn't the season for strawberries, and coconut is just plain wrong. So what about the pie I had last year, the caramel-walnut pie that was almost like eating candy and tasted so good in the buttery crust I made for it?

I thought about it, but the truth is that I associate that pie with a conversation I had while making it, and I didn't want to bring that memory into my preparations for this year's feast. New year, new plan. So I searched around in an old cookbook I have and found a recipe I'd never tried before, a nut pie with raisins and spices that seemed like the perfect accent to a Thanksgiving meal, traditional enough to go with the menu but unlike anything I'd made before. It called for corn syrup, an item I don't recall having in my kitchen since at least the early '80s, but it turns out that sugar and molasses work just as well. I made the pie last night, and as it cooled, a brown crust formed on the top, just like in the picture, giving no hint of what the center looked like.

This afternoon was a whirl of rinsing, chopping, and stirring, and I threw off my planning a little by sneaking off for sunbathing, but it didn't make any difference in the end as everything seemed to come together somehow. On the stereo, I put together what I considered to be the perfect soundtrack as a background to not only cooking but also eating and cleaning up: two parts jazz, one part roots rock, one part Linda Ronstadt (in her Nelson Riddle Orchestra days), and one part Irish fiddling. In case you've never tried it, jazz goes great with turkey, and there was enough variety in the mix to keep it all lively.

So what about this pie? I had imagined it would be similar to pecan pie, and it was, only . . . better. It actually has more sugar in it than last year's pie, which seems astonishing, but it doesn't have as much fat because, no cream. It's like a pecan pie with something unexpected, those raisins hitting your mouth like little nuggets of sunshine, the cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves complicating the sweetness to just the right degree. I had thrown in some hazelnuts, too, as a good Celt should. I don't know that I would have liked this pie as a kid, but I hope my tastes have matured at least a little since then. It's a dessert for grownups who can appreciate the layering of flavors without just swallowing the entire thing whole, and it probably makes you smarter, too (=hazelnuts).

So that was my Thanksgiving: smoky jazz, turkey and dressing, blue sky and sunshine, a pie that will stand up to a week in the refrigerator, and a sink full of dishes. I hope yours was good, too.