{"id":850,"date":"2020-10-24T00:11:20","date_gmt":"2020-10-24T00:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christiniacrippes.com\/food\/?p=850"},"modified":"2020-10-24T00:11:20","modified_gmt":"2020-10-24T00:11:20","slug":"poverty-pie-uses-on-hand-ingredients-for-delightful-dessert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/christiniacrippes.com\/food\/2020\/10\/24\/poverty-pie-uses-on-hand-ingredients-for-delightful-dessert\/","title":{"rendered":"Poverty pie uses on-hand ingredients for delightful dessert"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the things that my sweetie and I both enjoy is looking at old recipes. Among our favorites are cookbooks collected from a local community; for me, my favorite is one from the church where I believe my grandparents wed (or at least was a one-time hometown for one or both of them).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They offer insights into what\u2019s popular in a given time or given location, and they vary wildly in terms of quality, suggesting uncharitably that maybe not everyone can cook or more charitably that different people have some quite different tastes from me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that same vein, we also love discovering recipes that are likely from the Great Depression-era, or maybe just ones stemming from home chefs who have made a little go a long way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As someone who has been very, very privileged throughout this pandemic to both (so far) keep my job and work from home, I count myself extremely lucky that I do not, and have rarely, *needed* to make a little go a long way. But I am still grateful that these recipes survive to remind me both that poverty doesn\u2019t mean the absence of joy and that cheap doesn\u2019t mean gross. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week\u2019s recipe, in that sense, was a real revelation.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Vinegar pie ingredients.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I knew from looking at its ingredient list that it had to be a poverty pie, born of a need to use what\u2019s on hand to make a simple dessert. However, it wasn\u2019t until I tasted it that I figured out the tricks it used to make its bare-bone ingredients seem like something a little more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Correctly dubbed a vinegar pie, there\u2019s not much to the insides of this pie, but it does use white vinegar as its most unexpected-in-a-dessert ingredient. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would have been more skeptical but for two facts: (1) I figured Taste of Home<\/a> wouldn\u2019t promote a recipe of complete garbage, and (2) my Grandma Crippes\u2019 ditalini pasta salad <\/a>recipe relies on a very simple dressing of white vinegar, oil, and sugar, and it works delightfully well.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, some things about the recipe were confusing, and I doubted it would work well. Until I tried it and realized that everything makes sense once you know that vinegar pie is what happens when you want to make apple pie but cannot get the fresh fruit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That explained the small strips of dough on the bottom layer, and the use of vinegar to add a citric flavor when lemon juice may not be available, and the extra flour — like in a traditional apple pie — to help make an internal goop while baking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All in all, it was actually quite a delight and is a reminder that it\u2019s possible, if not ideal (hint: Congress pass a GD bill to help people<\/a>) to make apple-ish pie out of vinegar. Literally.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It’s not pretty, it’s not fancy, but it’s a good enough, tasty enough pie.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s what I did, following the recipe only making it 9-inch instead of 12 and slightly altering the water level as I found it to be too much for my small skillet: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ingredients<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n