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Don’t worry, dear friends.  Having gone on for the equivalent of 10 pages about the Accidental Pie yesterday, I see no need to subject you to more of it.  But I do remember making a promise to bake a real cherry pie this morning, and to show you the result.

Tvindy had asked if I still preferred the classic recipe to the Accidental Pie.  While I will always have affection for the A.P. for providing me such a lark of a story, I’m afraid that when it comes to eating, it just doesn’t stand a chance against the Real Cherry Pie.  I never liked cherry pie as a kid, and now I know why.  Too many cherry pies are made with commercial cherry pie filling, which does use proper pie cherries, but also uses excessive amounts of sugar, corn syrup and thickeners.  Some brands even use red dye, which leaves a nasty aftertaste and is completely unnecessary when you consider that the skin of the pie cherry has more than enough pigment to turn your pie the most dreamy shade of pink imaginable.

I love the whole process of making this pie.  I love that even though I can go a full year between making cherry pies, when the time comes to do it again, I can pretty much do it from memory.  If I am good and organized, pie crust will have been made the day before and left to rest in the fridge.  Take it out, let it soften slightly at room temperature, dust the pastry cloth, roll out the dough, turn it into the pie plate, roll out some more, cut out the lattice strips, put it all back in the freezer.  Sit down and watch one of your Danger Man DVD’s while you pit 2 quarts of cherries.  Juice will run all over everything.  Your fingers will get sticky with juice that is not so much sour as tart, fragrant and floral and berried and gently mouth-puckering and intensely cherry.

Wash your hands.  Turn your cherries into a colander over a saucepan.  Add sugar to the juice and cook it over a medium flame.  Stop stirring just long enough to get your pie shell and lattice strips from the fridge.  When your sugar is dissolved, stir in a cup of those pitted cherries.  Lick the bead of juice that has spattered onto your wrist, and thank the universe for the concept of Spoils for the Cook.  Watch the cherries give up their juice to the sugar syrup, which bubbles like mad.  Stir in your arrowroot slurry and watch the whole lot stiffen up.  Add a bit of almond extract and a bit of butter, then the rest of the cherries.  Watch everything slacken up again, ready to thicken the rest of the juice that will seep out of the cherries during baking.  Cherries in the shell, lattice on the cherries, egg wash on the lattice, everything into a nice hot oven.  50 minutes later, your pie is done, juices bubbling over, the sign that everything has got hot enough and the arrowroot will continue doing its job.  You know you have to wait to eat it, that very few things are actually made to be eaten right out of the oven and cherry pie is definitely not one of them, and yet you wonder if you can just dispense with your tomato and mozzarella sandwiches and just eat pie for lunch.

No, it’s no contest.  Accidental Pie fills me with affection.  Real Cherry Pie fills me with love.