Handheld Pies

The Good Cook: You dedicate Handheld Pies to your mother, grandma and great-grandma, from whom you inherited the pie-baking gene. What bits of their baking wisdom do you follow to this day?

Sarah Billingsley: All of it! From setting up all of my ingredients, the tools I choose to use, to the way I pinch the dough, I absorbed so much from the way they baked. It’s like learning to fold shirts or make a bed: you grow up doing it one way and that’s just the way you do it for the rest of your life.
More specifically, my mother and grandmother are fastidious women, but when you’re baking, it’s ok to make a mess. In fact, revel in the mess! There’s a very relaxed, fun feeling that comes from throwing flour. You should talk to the dough—“Come on, don’t’ you stick.” It works. And one day I’ll inherit the heavy, wooden, farmhouse rolling pin I grew up with. No rolling pin I’ve found can match its weight or wear.

TGC: You pack an amazing selection of pie crust recipes—flaky butter, sturdy cream cheese, luscious lard, versatile cornmeal chocolate crumb and graham cracker—into Handheld Pies, and offer great advice on using prepared dough as well. When you bake pies, which crust do you prefer? Why?

SB: I’m a sucker for butter crust. I love the look, the flake, the flavor of it. I am definitely of the “butter makes everything better” school of cooking. But each crust serves its purpose in the book. The cream cheese crust is very manageable and flavorful, so beginners have an easy time with it. All the pat-in-the-pan cookie crusts—chocolate crumb, graham cracker, gingersnap, pretzel—are super easy, too, and for those concerned with baking in jars, they don’t need to be baked. The cornmeal crust is excellent with savory fillings. The lard is a traditional favorite—my great grandmother and grandmother always used lard—and I also love the texture and flavor of this crust.

Every time I see an interesting crust, I want to try it out. Heidi Swanson recently featured a crust using rye flour on her 101 Cookbooks blog, and I’ve become obsessed with making it for apple pies and pot pies. It is my crust of the moment.

TGC: Your freeform pies are so darn irresistible that it’s hard not to eat them all right off the baking sheet, They make terrific takeaways for lunches and picnics, etc., but they can be fragile. What’s the best way to transport them?

SB: They’re sturdy enough to stand up to a bit of sliding around. Any sturdy box such as a Chinese takeout container or a metal lunchbox will do as well. The pies can be stacked if parchment is placed between them. I wouldn’t stack more than three or they might crumble. If you’ve made pies in a muffin tin, they can be transported in the tin. And some small, round containers, such as those that takeout soups and Indian food come in, are perfect containers for single small, round pies.