Previous installments of Jessica Valenti’s “Eat Me” column can be found here. Most recently: Sunday Sauce.
I grew up in a house in Long Island City, Queens that my great-grandparents bought almost 100 years ago. There was an apartment upstairs and over the years the downstairs was a paint store, my grandfather’s butcher shop, and a candy store that turned out to be a front for a fraud and hijacking ring. (My parents got wise when they found the house surrounded by armed FBI agents. Their phones were tapped for about three months afterwards.) After my sister was born my parents took over both floors, knocked down all the walls and called it a loft.
Despite its name, Long Island City is not a part of Long Island (hmph) – but is the area of Queens closest to Manhattan, right over the 59th street/Queensboro bridge. Before LIC was condos and 20-somethings dancing at Warm Up, it was factories that everyone knew were sweatshops and sex workers lined the blocks as soon as it hit 6pm. Most mornings, my mom put on gloves and picked up used condoms thrown from car windows in front of our house and into our yard. Our ‘yard’, really – 250 square feet of uneven concrete. It doubled as a parking space after my parents poured cement on the curb to make a ramp and built swinging gates to open it up the street – a not so legal move to stop our car tires from being stolen and the windows smashed.
There was a lone space of dirt at the cracked intersections of concrete. When I was a toddler, my parents planted a cherry tree there that grew bigger than they ever expected. Its branches reached over the gate so fully that people walking by could pluck off cherries without breaking their stride. My sister and I would watch for the cherries – the greening of the branches, then the white flowers, then the fruit – and fought over who would climb highest on the ladder to pick the “best” ones.
The tree started producing more cherries than my parents knew what to do with – one or two hundred pounds a year – so my father filled brown paper lunch bags and gave cherries out to neighbors, shop owners, or anyone who stopped to look at the tree.
My parents met a block from what would become my house, yard and tree when my mom was 12 and my dad was 15. They got married five years later. They leave a lot out when they talk about their childhood, but the violence comes out in dribs and drabs. I heard rumors of my father throwing a man through the window of a bowling alley for beating up his younger brother. Of my mother hiding from her drunk father and handsy uncles. Of shoplifting (my mom) and of being beaten near to death by a group of boys from a rival neighborhood (my dad). Of why you shouldn’t trust cops. My cousin told me once about my father catching a thief in our house and chasing him down the block with a hammer.
My parents loved our house, but they did not want me to go to school near there. I tested into a magnet junior high in Manhattan and started taking the subway to it when I was 11. First my parents walked me to the station – 39th BeBe Avenue on the N line – but later let me walk the three blocks by myself. When I was 12, a man masturbated in front of me on the train platform. Despite warnings from my parents about what to do in such a situation, I froze in place when it happened. He finally stopped when a train pulled in. I tapped a man in a suit coming off the train and asked for help but he didn’t stop moving. So I waited for the next train, figuring I should get to school – but got off one stop later at Queens Plaza when I couldn’t stop shaking.
Every day after that, my father walked me up to platform to wait for the train. The booth worker let him through the gate without paying after my dad explained what had happened. He gave him a bag of cherries every week as a thank you. Waiting for the train one day, I noticed an odd shape under my father’s jacket. He tried to distract me with a joke but when I asked him about it a second time he pulled up his shirt to show me the metal pipe that was sticking out the top of his pants. He assured me that no cop would ever arrest him for beating up a man who flashes children. Today he tells me he knows that was a lie, but he had to bring the pipe with him anyway.
A few years ago my parents realized they couldn’t afford to stay in our house, but that young hip families would pay a lot of rent to live there. Around the same time, the tree started to die – disease crawling up the trunk, resulting in fewer and fewer cherries. They didn’t tell me when they chopped it down – I saw the hacked stump when I dropped by one day to peek over the fence to see what the house looked like without us in it.
Towards the end of the tree’s cherry season, when we had exhausted our paper bag supply and the yard was splattered with red streaks and browning fruit carcasses, I would gather up the cherries we had left and make pie with my mother. The pie kept for about as long as it took to get the red stains off of our fingers. A few days.
***
RECIPE:
Pies always seemed intimidating to me as an adult, but the truth is that they’re fairly easy to make if you can get the dough right. To make the crust, mix 2 sticks of butter, 2 1/4 cups of flour and a dash of salt in a food processor until it’s crumbly. Add either a tablespoon of sour cream or a 1/4 cup of ice water then run in the processor until the dough makes a ball.
Cut the ball in half – roll one out on wax paper to put in the bottom of your pie dish (the other ball should be rolled out too; you’ll use that as the top).
The inside of the cherry pie is as easy as…well, you know. Get about 4 pounds of sour or sweet cherries. (I prefer sweet.) Pit them, and mix with a cup of sugar and 1/4 cup of cornstarch. Add the mixture to the crust in the pie dish, add the top. You can decorate with holes, cut-outs, etc – I just like to let it be. Brush the top with a mixture of water and sugar.
Bake at 375 degrees until the top starts to brown and bubble – usually about 40 to 50 minutes.
Dust with powdered sugar, serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. Eat your memories.
Tags: cherry pie, eat me, food, jessica valenti, recipes
This is one of my favorite series. Thank you, Jessica, for writing it, and thank you Mallory and Nicole for featuring it.
Thank you!!
I’m so excited that Eat Me is back! I’ve loved this column since the beginning.
Also, I’ve made the garlic goat cheese about 5 times in the last few months and everybody LOVES it, so thanks for that. 🙂 My favorite variation was adding some olive tapenade to it after baking.
I make the goat cheese CONSTANTLY, and so does Mallory. It’s so easy and delicious and un-fuck-up-able.
YES! Also, there are so many delicious vehicles that you can put it on–crackers, carrots, pita chips, soft bread, crunchy bread, and my favorite–A SPOON.
So, Costco sells these double packs of 16oz goats cheese logs for $8. WORTH IT and perfect for this recipe and also, cheap. Costco enables my love of dairy every day. Thanks, Costco.
This makes me SO HAPPY to hear.
How did I miss the goat cheese recipe? This would have been perfect for New Year’s (although I already had about four times as much food as necessary.) Time to throw another party I guess!
I love this story. All of your stories.
Separately:
I’ve never made a pie.
You just described pitting 4 pounds of cherries as easy. D:
Truly, how long does that take?
In my experience, if you’re watching tv or something while you do it, maybe an hour for 4lbs? It’s not hard, just tedious.
Getting a pitter would cut down that time, but I’m not sufficiently fancy for that.
I feel like they should give you a free cherry pitter with the purchase of a cherry tree, or a house with a cherry tree.
Pull the eraser out of a pencil and wash it: viola, pitter.
That’s what minions are for…
A while. Also it makes your kitchen look like a crime scene.
Time consuming. But simple. If you’re going to do it very often, I recommend getting a cherry pitter (I got one when I made cherry almond jam.) http://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-Cherry-Olive-Pitt… I have this one in black. You can find them in Target, Fred Meyer, etc, and of course cooking supply stores.
I just took a look at that, and in the reviews someone suggested just using a paperclip instead. Insert double-loop end of the paperclip where the stem was, twist, and pull out the pit. Could work?
You can also use a bobby pin, inserting the rounded part.
Maybe, but it sounds like a lot more work that a cherry pitter. To me, the best feature of cherry pitters is that they require very little precision–the pit is in the center, so any direction the pitter comes in from will pop out the pit.
Thank you!
I used to do this with my mom and sister and it took us like half hour or so. I think by yourself you could do an hour – but yeah, no joke.
It takes me one Red Hot Chili Peppers album to pit all the cherries for a pie. I have a fancy Italian cherry pitter because I love obscure kitchen tools. I hear of people using paper clips too. Or in the winter, buy a bag of frozen pitted cherries. I always add a little brandy.
I love this series! Jessica, you’re such a beautiful writer.
Wow, how I have I missed the gloriousness that is this series?
On the other hand, now I’m sitting here drooling at my desk and it will be SO LONG before I can eat anything.
This is lovely and made me hungry for cherries and summer. The wedding picture of your parents is completely adorable.
always strange to hear about the violence that happened before you arrived on the scene. the house i grew up in seemed totally unassailable to me but had apparently seen my mother’s car firebombed to nothing but a glassy stain on the tarmac after my older brother pissed off the wrong people.
ps non-savoury pies are an affront to my australian eyes/mouth
while savory pies are fine, sweet pies are where it’s at! get your mouth educated!
Now, now – no fighting. There’s room in this big world for all KINDS of pie, and they are all delicious.
Psst… you’re missing a measurement for the ice water.
Cup! cup! Editor friends – can you add in? Apologies!
On it!
and your preferred method for getting the top crust to stick to the bottom crust? (I know what *I* would do, but if there are pie novices about, they might need some help!)
Such a great memoir-style story!
Long Island City is on Long Island! ADMIT IT.
(kidding.)
(actually not entirely kidding, because New York georgraphy can confusing as hell to non-locals, so let me explain to everyone else: Long Island, geographically, is an island on which there are 4 counties: Brooklyn (or Kings, if you want to be old school) Queens, Nassau and Suffolk. Brooklyn and Queens are part of the City of New York, Nassau and Suffolk aren’t. When people colloquially refer to Long Island, they usually just mean Nassau and Suffolk. BUT IT’S ALL THE SAME ISLAND. Some of us grew up on the Queens/Nassau border and are quite touchy about this.)
Ahaha. I enjoy your explanation. I too am from very near that border, although firmly planted on the Nassau side, no doubt about it. I spent 4 years at a college in MD where half my classmates were from LI/NJ so nobody was ever confused about it, and then went into the real world and discovered how terrible it was trying to explain it to everyone else in the world.
I’d say that LIC is ON Long Island, but it isn’t IN Long Island, so it’s accurate to say it isn’t a “a part of” Long Island. But yes, lots of people don’t know about the geography!
Mmm. When I make fruit pie, it’s almost always blueberry, apple, or a wild blueberry-blackberry mix, but you have me wondering when I can get my hands on some fresh cherries. I can’t even remember the last time I had homemade cherry pie. Even when I was a kid, “cherry pie” mostly meant the bright-red sticky filling blopped out of a can*.
*which, I’m not going to front, I would eat the whole thing, but it’s not the same as fresh cherries.
I wish I had a cherry pie, and also that my family’s Astoria property hadn’t been sold off two generations ago.
As a former LICer as well as a lover of pies, this makes me so happy!
Two of my three sisters climbed the black and red cherry trees isolated among the cows grazing below. No baskets of cherries were filled for the pies, only stains of red and black down our shirts sucking the fruit around the pits.
Cherry pies are one of my favorite. I’m terrible at rolling crust though. My pies are delicious, but inevitably ugly.
These stories are great!!! I love hearing about old New York, even if it's in hints of what your parents said about their childhoods. My boyfriend's mom is from Williamsburg and she had a really rough childhood–she got out of the city first thing by marrying my boyfriend's dad.
I love Cherry pies! And yeah, it also took me more than an hour preparing this recipe. Looking forward for more stories!