Mar 14

Even Cake Mix Doctors Love Pie

Today wasn’t a major holiday or the scene of a potluck supper – occasions when I bake and bring pie. And of course it wasn’t summertime when the good South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia peaches start falling off trees and coming into our markets. Then we can’t think of anything but those fat, ripe, juicy peaches and baking pie. No, this was just a Wednesday in March known to math nerds worldwide as Pi Day: 3.14.

Pi is the mathematical constant that is the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a geometric circle. It is abbreviated to 3.14. The geek in me started scheming what pie I might bake to impress my kids on Pi Day.

Would it be blueberry – no, they don’t have enough flavor now. What about apple – always a slam dunk with my husband but honestly, those apples are surely grown a hemisphere away or have been in cold storage and besides, it’s 78 degrees in Nashville today, no time for apple pie! Something light, something non-seasonal, something so simple everyone will appreciate, I thought.  Thus, the pie must be chess, or at least my now improved buttermilk version of my grandmother’s chess pie.

Buttermilk is the magical ingredient, adding liquid and acidic component a good chess pie needs. The other ingredients – sugar, eggs, butter, salt – we have on hand. Cornmeal is in the freezer, and so is the trusty pie crust. (Sorry, but the Cake Mix Doctor often relies on the frozen crust.)

The numbers 3.14 may be short for Pi, but the ratio never ends. Reminds me of the never-ending pleas I hear to bake pie. The edible one that is!

Here is the recipe for chess pie.