Make the high pyre.
Just the other day I was looking through my various cookbooks to find a dessert that could be made with my meagre supplies and settled on the “No-Bake Black Bottom-Peanut Butter Silk Pie” from Isa Chandra Moskovitz’s excellent collection Vegan With A Vengeance, which is full of more temptingly scrumptious-sounding recipes and confusingly-used hyphens than I can shake a grammar textbook at. The pie turned out pretty well (and for those of you who think there is no way that the peanut butter/chocolate combo can ever go awry there are a few NYC vegan bakeries that I could show you), despite making my miniature kitchen look like a post-punkapocalyptic wasteland, and I would recommend her book both for the breadth of its proletarian gourmet scope and for all of her helpful advice. One complaint I have, however, is that several of her recipes feature ingredients, in this case agar (-agar), that no one living outside of a select few major metropolises, wealthy ex-hippy exurban enclaves, or Japan will ever be able to find. I mean, fenugreek? Asafoetida? Hijiki? Come on, now. I hardly know how to pronounce those, let alone what they are or where to buy them (though it’s nice to see someone expanding the vocabulary of vegan culinary discourse (even if they do so through a talking cartoon cat)). She does include plenty of recipes for those of us with less exotic pantries, and I just read about her cooking/hosting a Man Man dinner party in Manhattan, so I guess we’re cool. It’s probably my fault for not moving to Brooklyn anyway.
Today’s recipe has almost nothing to do with the above, except inasmuch as it involves pie - pecan pie, to be precise. This originally appeared in the first volume of my cookbook and is a slightly spicy take on the traditional recipe. I usually think of it as being more of a fall/winter holiday dish, but served with a scoop of soy or rice cream and a cup of coffee it’s a great after dinner treat for any season. Astute readers may notice in the picture below that I baked mine in a cake pan instead of a pie plate. This is because, given the miniscule size of my kitchen, my average cake-to-pie baking ratio, and a sort of thrifty and non-sensical pragmatism, I decided to not to buy one of each. My argument was that, while you can cook a pie in a cake pan, you can’t really bake a cake in a pie plate. . . unless we’re talking about cheesecake, in which case we have a whole other ontological argument on our hands.
Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups flour
- 3/4 tsp. salt
- 1/2 cup shortening
- 3 tbsp. water
- 2 cups whole pecans
- 6 tbsp. margarine
- 1 tbsp. honey
- 2/3 cup maple syrup
- 2/3 cup corn syrup
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp. ginger
- 1/4 tsp. allspice
- 3 measures egg replacer
Equipment: cake pan/pie plate, frying pan/saucepan, mixing bowl/salad bowl, countertop/chopping block, oven/culinary blowtorch.
Music: Town and Country - C’mon
Instructions:
- Preheat the oven to 450.
- In a mixing bowl, sift together flour and 1/2 tsp. salt. Add the shortening and stir until blended.
- Add the water and mix until the dough being to hold together.
- On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough into a circle using whatever rolling-pin-shaped object you have at hand. Place the dough in a lightly oiled pie plate and form it to the sides.
- Bake the crust for 10-15 minutes until dry and light brown (if you want to keep the dough from puffing up too much while cooking, you can weigh it down with a large sheet of waxed paper or tin foil covered in dried beans or very small rocks, but it should turn out all right either way).
- Reset the oven to 350.
- Melt 2 tbsp. margarine in a saucepan, then add honey and the pecans. Roast the pecans until browned, turning them often to prevent burning.
- Melt the remaining margarine and combine it in a mixing bowl with the syrups, vanilla, spices, salt, and egg replacer. Stir until smooth.
- Place the half of the pecans on the bottom of the crust (I usually throw some chocolate chips in here too, but if you don’t want your dessert to taste even mroe awesome then by all means, leave them out) and pour the filling over them.
- Arrange the remaining pecans in a pleasing pattern on top of the filling and bake the pie for 25-30 minutes.
- Be cool.
Some people are a little grossed-out by the idea of consuming corn syrup. Given the quality of foods that it normally appears in I can’t say that I blame them. Scientifically speaking (according to the reading I’ve done) there is no noticeable nutritional difference between it and any of the other glucose or fructose-based syrups available (it’s really the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup that you want to avoid), but if you feel more comfortable replacing it with brown rice syrup, or whatever, the recipe should still work out just fine. I’m not sure that I’d use molasses, but that may just be because of the lingering smell of local tragedy. If you want to get really fancy you can try cooking some candied ginger (and maybe a little orange peel) along with the pecans - not that I’ve tried this myself, mind you, it just seems like it would be a good idea. I usually settle for adding some chocolate chips and calling it a day (maybe even grating a little bittersweet chocolate an sprinkling it over the top if I feel like putting in that little bit of extra effort). I’ve had a little difficulty getting the inside to be as springy and voluminous as your average non-vegan late-night diner slice due to the irreplaceability of egg whites, so perhaps I should become more acquainted with agar after all.
Finally, for those of you who were wondering, today’s title is an off-handed reference to our glorious and malevolent leader, who, for those of you who may have forgotten, resides somewhere in the dictionary between cretin and buffoon.
