Learning to bake a pie

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This holiday season I left the ingredients for Spanish cream cheese stuffed dates in the pantry and took a big step in the cultural assimilation process: I signed up for a baking class at a cooking school. According to the ad in the local newspaper, students would learn to bake heart healthy pies. Pie making is a skill, I reasoned. Reading labels while searching for low-fat, low-sugar baked goods, fresh or frozen, took too much time in the grocery store. I'd do anything to speed that chore. As I drove to the river town of Palatka from St. Augustine where I live in Northeast Florida, I considered the home cooks I'd met over the years. Apart from making custards and bread pudding, Cubans and other Caribbean islanders were not big on baking. Pie baking and, heaven forbid, cake baking are activities designed for Northerners, I concluded long ago. My two sisters-in-law, both from Michigan, were bakers. At the time, Northerners were defined in South Florida as anyone who lived north of Fort Lauderdale. The reason is obvious. Baking -- whether pies, cakes, pastries or bread -- heats up the kitchen. When you're living in the subtropics or tropics, you keep the heat out of the house. That's why Cubans roast their Christmas Eve pig in a pit dug in the backyard. I was the first student to arrive to The Cooking School. Would the instructor recognize my courage, as a bold Latina, one finally taking a cultural step into the world of baking? I was thinking I was kind of special. Then a Chinese man, the only male in the class, arrived. My status dropped a notch. His non-Chinese wife was a New Hampshire native, a baker, of course, and grower of fresh vegetables. The man and his wife engaged the class in a discussion of Chinese vegetable preparation and using fresh ones straight from the field. I held back while they worked out their own cultural problems. The instructor handed out recipes for Banana Pumpkin Pie, Cranberry Tarts, Apple Galettes and Pecan Tartlets. A tall, thin woman volunteered to be my partner. I was suspicious of her, someone I guessed who was raised with a pastry blender instead of a rattle. She could roll a piecrust while chatting on the phone. Immediately I learned we shared a similar view: food should be tasty and healthy but there's no need to linger over preparation. In fact, while rolling the piecrust a little thinner and less elongated, she revealed her husband did all the cooking. She washed the dishes. At times she made dessert. I believe she had married a king. Desperation to complete the pie fueled our process. We measured carefully, mixed properly and finished first, though there was no contest. Then we sat to sip a glass of wine while the others still had goods in the oven. At a long dining room table, 10 students and the instructor tasted our baked good. We were given a plate with samples to take home. What a beautiful class! An interested husband was waiting for me. He tried a pecan tartlet and took another one. "Let me see the recipes," he said. I looked for them in my purse, then ran out to the car. They weren't there, either. In my haste, I'd left the recipes at the school. What had happened? Perhaps one lesson was enough, I knew I could do it but really didn't want to bake. It was my own fault for trying to acculturate in unnatural ways. My Great Aunt Carmen's Spanish cream cheese stuffed dates would continue to reign through the holidays. Then I thought about the whole-wheat piecrust and banana pumpkin pie I would never taste again. In the morning I'd call and ask the instructor to please send the recipes I'd left behind. (Marisella Veiga, of St. Augustine, Florida, is a contributing columnist with Hispanic Link News Service. She may be reached at mveiga(at)bellsouth.net. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com)