A Life Lived in Courses

October 9, 1995

Thanksgiving was running late.

Not disastrously late. Nobody had lost the turkey. We had simply decided that Thanksgiving, traditionally celebrated on Sunday in our family, would make a perfectly good Monday.

There were seven of us around the table, including my grandmother Rose, my mother’s mother.

My grandmother was a great cook. A lot of what we ate came through her, sometimes by recipe and sometimes by osmosis.

My mother had learned the way people often learn family cooking: by watching, helping and eventually acquiring the confidence to know what belonged in a dish without having to look everything up.

Thanksgiving had its requirements.

There was stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, carrots and turnip. And then there were a couple of things that had wandered in from another era and apparently had no intention of leaving.

Tomato aspic was one of them.

By 1995, tomato aspic had already passed its cultural peak, but my mother was not especially interested in culinary fashion. I don’t remember any of us being particularly enthusiastic about it. Still, there it was, quietly occupying its place on the Thanksgiving table.

Some family dishes survive because everyone loves them.

Others survive because they have been around so long that getting rid of them would feel strangely impolite.

There was also rice salad, although my memories of it are considerably less vivid. It was there. I am sure it was perfectly respectable. History has simply decided not to preserve it.

Dessert was easier to remember.

Pumpkin pie, naturally.

And sugar pie.

The sugar pie was more than dessert, although I wouldn’t have known that at the time.

The French name is tarte au sucre, and versions of the dessert existed in northern France and Belgium long before sugar pie became one of the signatures of French Canadian cooking. Some European versions were made with a yeasted dough rather than the pastry crust we associate with Quebec, with sugar, butter and cream doing the work of turning a fairly modest list of ingredients into something worth sitting down for.

When the tradition crossed the Atlantic, it adapted to its new home.

Sugar was not an inexpensive everyday ingredient in early New France. Maple was abundant, however, and maple syrup and maple sugar became important sweeteners. Canadian versions of sugar pie developed their own character, including recipes using maple sugar.

There is even an 1893 Canadian recipe for Maple Sugar Pie made with maple sugar, milk and eggs.

By 1995, none of this history was sitting on the table beside the pie. It didn’t need to be.

My mother was simply making Thanksgiving dinner.

That is how traditions tend to work. You don’t usually feel history happening while you’re eating it.

Outside our house, the world was beginning to change in ways that would soon make 1995 look almost quaint.

The Internet existed, but it hadn’t yet become the place where we would eventually do nearly everything. Google didn’t exist. Facebook didn’t exist. Smartphones were science fiction. Carrying your entire music collection around in your pocket would have sounded absurd. We were still carrying CDs around in cases like tiny, easily scratched suitcases.

That night, television offered The Nanny, Melrose Place, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Star Trek: Voyager, Murphy Brown, Chicago Hope and Monday Night Football.

The Seattle Mariners had just beaten the New York Yankees 6 to 5 to win their American League Division Series.

Michael Crichton’s The Lost World was at No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover fiction list. Braveheart, Apollo 13, Clueless, Pocahontas and Seven were among the year’s big movies.

The world was busy becoming the future.

We were having Thanksgiving.

Seven people around a table.

Turkey and stuffing. Gravy. Cranberry sauce. Mashed potatoes. Carrots and turnip.

Rice salad.

Tomato aspic, still hanging on.

Pumpkin pie.

Sugar pie.

My grandmother Rose was there.

She died in August 2001.

I don’t remember what we talked about that night. I don’t remember who sat where, who cleared the plates or what happened after dinner. Those details have gone the way most details from ordinary family evenings eventually go.

What remains is the menu.

And the strange fact that a menu can carry people with it.

My grandmother’s cooking had made its way to my mother. My mother made it for us. Decades later, I am making one of those recipes again.

The tomato aspic can remain safely in 1995.

The sugar pie, however, came with me.

Maybe that is what gets lost when we talk about recipes as though they are simply instructions.

A recipe is also evidence.

Evidence that someone was here. That they cooked. That they fed people. That they had a way of doing things and thought it worth doing again.

On October 9, 1995, we had Thanksgiving.

At the time, it was just dinner.

Now it feels like a little piece of my family history that happened to be served with pie.

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Sugar Pie

This is the sugar pie my mother made for Thanksgiving in 1995, when seven of us gathered around the table, including my grandmother Rose. My grandmother was a great cook, and many of the recipes my mother made came through her.

The filling has just four ingredients: brown sugar, flour, evaporated milk and egg. No maple syrup, no spices, no fuss. Just a sweet, creamy filling in a pastry crust.

The original recipe simply says “brown sugar” and “uncooked pie crust,” so I have specified light brown sugar and a 9 inch crust here.

Makes: 1 9 inch pie
Prep time: 10 minutes
Bake time: 40 minutes
Oven: 400°F, then 350°F

Ingredients

½ cup packed light brown sugar

2 tablespoons all purpose flour

1 cup evaporated milk

1 large egg, beaten

1 unbaked 9 inch pie crust

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2. Whisk together the brown sugar and flour in a medium bowl.
3. Add the evaporated milk and beaten egg. Whisk until smooth.
4. Pour into the unbaked pie crust.
5. Bake at 400°F for 10 minutes.
6. Reduce the oven temperature to 350°F and bake for 30 minutes more, until the edges are set and the centre has a slight jiggle.
7. Cool completely on a wire rack before slicing.

Recipe note: The original does not specify light or dark brown sugar. I use light brown sugar for a clean caramel flavour. A standard 9 inch pie crust works best.