Raspberry pie

The end of summer also means the end of raspberry season, which is a sad event indeed. I'm not sure why raspberries always seem so elusive. I spend a good deal of time driving around the city trying to buy them while they're around for those few short weeks. But when the result is a box of perfectly plump berries, all scarlet and bursting with flavour, the effort is so worth it.

This year, the raspberry gods were smiling down on me, and I managed to purchase a couple of litres of berries in early August. I immediately decided I wanted to make a pie, and the evidence of that is above.

Raspberry pie is probably my all-time favourite. My fondness likely stems back to my Grandma Pammett, who was an excellent pie baker. Butter tarts, icebox cookies and pies were some of her specialties, and I have lots of good memories of eating raspberry pies in her little dining room in the house on Bolivar Street. I have the same hutch from that room in my own dining room now, so I like to think there was a little familial continuity when I baked and served this pie many decades later.

I followed the filling recipe from Joy of Cooking, so if you're inclined, you can look it up. It calls for about 6 cups of fruit, some sugar to taste, zest of a lime or lemon and a bit of flour or cornstarch. In it goes to the pie crust, the recipe for which came from this book (sourced through a phone call to my mum, so more points for familial connections on that point). The recipe is fairly standard, but I will tell you the secret is to use all butter for the fat. It helps if the butter is frozen, because then it will grate perfectly into the flour. It makes for a very crisp and flaky pastry, which is really what you want in a pie.

You can see the result in the picture. It's far from perfect, and I'm sure Dorothy P wouldn't approve of my laziness in the basketweave top, nor in my haphazard crimping round the edges. But messy though it may be, there's no denying its tastiness. Shame I'll have to wait another year for the next one.