Peach Pie and Pie Crusts - How Food Creates Identity
It’s pie season! The berries are ripe and fresh fruit is being shipped within and between the provinces of Canada instead of coming from outside the country. That Ontario produces a huge number of peaches has not escaped the world’s attention as even Nutella has identified peaches as an iconic ingredient for the province in their “Savour the beauty of Ontario” recipe.
When I think of Ontario produce, I think of what’s around me: berries, carrots, potatoes, apples. These have become my idea of the “basics” – foods that have always been around. But of course, they haven’t always been around. These are foods that colonizers brought to the Astorville and Corbeil area when they moved here from Charlevoix and the Eastern Townships of Quebec. These food items are what they considered “good” food and since this is what their kids and their kids’ kids and their kids’ kids’ kids grew up with, these are the foods that have been passed down to my generation in the form of special meals and familiar recipes.
In many ways, food is as political a project as building roads or erecting buildings. We create major events around food and a closer look at how food can be used to identify a person or a group is an important aspect of studying culture. According to Pierre Bourdieu in “Taste of Luxury, Taste of Necessity” (available in The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink), when studying a culture’s foodways, one must understand “the conditions in which the consumers of cultural goods, and their taste for them, are produced, and at the same time… describe the different ways of appropriating… these objects” (72). This is because, as Barthes argues, when individuals buy, consumer, or serve cultural goods, like culturally representative foods, they “construct and sustain their identities. At the same time, these acts – and the broad range of cultural representations that support and are supported by them – also serve as vehicles through which ideological expectations about those identities are circulated, enforced, and transgressed” (see Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccrato’s “Introduction” in Edible Ideologies: Representing Food & Meaning page 1).
This past Sunday would have been the Astorville Picnic – an annual fundraising event for the local church. Every year, hundreds of people would line up to eat in or take out the picnic’s main foods: cipaille, coleslaw, and pie. At different times over the course of its history, this was a big event that included community sports, bingo, and kids’ games like fish pond. It was a chance to catch up with friends and family and eat good cipaille – a dish that many do not make themselves. And while dessert was not the main draw of the event, it does not go without notice that pie had always been the dessert served at picnic.
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Astorville Picnic 1931
In days of yore, before public health food regulations, the pies were donated by members of the community. My uncle often talks about the time my grandmother mom donated a raspberry pie made of wild raspberries! The anguish he still feels when he shares this story serves to solidify just how big a sacrifice it was for him, as a young boy, to have his hard work sacrificed to the church picnic (See “Raspberry Memories” for more about wild berry picking).
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, my mother would receive a call every year asking her if she could bring in pie. I have distinct memories of her donating a peach pies to the picnic - something that caused a bit of a sensation as peach pie is not as common in this area as raspberry or blueberry. These donations were all set up on the stage and you could request the flavour you wanted. When people couldn’t give a pie, they could also donate ingredients for any part of the meal. (Literally any part of the meal. When I started helping with picnic, I would often hear about the time someone donated a live chicken to the cause!) When rules changed and all the pies needed to be made on site, the committee narrowed down the selection to four choices: raspberry, blueberry, sugar, and lemon meringue.
As with most traditional foods we’ll talk about in this blog, there isn’t anything about pies, peaches or pie crust that is uniquely French-Canadian or Franco-Ontarian. What matters, is that the people in my study identified fruit and sugar pie as a French-Canadian/Franco-Ontarian traditional food. In fact, pies came in fifth in the Top 5 traditional foods during my PhD interviews. My interviewees identified pies as a French-Canadian/Franco-Ontarian dessert simply because they ate them often at their French-Canadian/Franco-Ontarian gatherings or in their own homes which they identified as being French-Canadian/Franco-Ontarian. Pies are not really that hard to make and often use local ingredients. They are also versatile - something we’ll explore in future blogs.
As an annual event started by French-speaking families in a French-speaking community, the annual picnic celebration served to reinforce ideas of what it means to be French-Canadian/Franco-Ontarian. Identity, according to David Sutton in Remembrance of Repast: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, “is not composed of a fixed set of memories but lies in the dialectical, ceaseless activity of remembering and forgetting, assimilating and discarding” (9). It is in the act of remembrance that individuals affirm their cultural selves. It is not just in talking about the past but in actually repeating and recreating those activities in the present, that people prove to themselves and to others who they are and what they care about.
Mother-daughter pie making at the Astorville Picnic
Pie crust is one of those food items that people often struggle to make. (Struggle, as we’ll see in future blogs, is one reason traditional foods are eliminated from one’s food repertoire.) My first time helping at picnic, I took out my rolling pin and started working on my ball of dough. The women around me nodded in approval and made comments about having had a mother who taught me well. This led to conversations about learning to make pie, struggles people are the tables have had with pie crust, and much about the art of baking a “good” pie.
To be honest, I don’t remember when I learnt to make pie. As a kid, I often sat on the counter and watched my mom work. Baking became instinctive and though I certainly made mistakes on my way to becoming proficient, I could made pies by myself when I was in elementary school. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized pie crust was a formidable and intimidating food item.
Pie making is something visible and tangible. It’s something others see and recognize. Going to picnic reinforced that pie makers are a distinct group and that the French-speaking women of my community recognize pie making as a key part of their cultural identiy. That I fit into to the group was even more clear when I brought my daughters years later. They also aren’t intimidated by the dough. They make pies like they were born doing it: instinctively, naturally. They were also automatically recognized as part of this group and they (and I as their mom and my mom as their grandmother) were praised for the abilities .
So… had we been at an English-speaking event where pie was being made, would we have been recognized as part of the pie-making group too? I believe we would have. But there would have been other elements of the group that would have also distinguish the members as part of a different culture. What matters in my study of French-Canadian and Franco-Ontarian foodways is that rolling pie crust is something that is part of French-Canadian/Franco-Ontarian culture in my area. In their introduction to Cultural Studies, Cary Nelson, Paul A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg define cultural studies as “the study of the entire range of a society’s arts, beliefs, institutions, and communicative practices” (4). To study culture means to look at both “symbolic and material domains” which “involves not privileging one domain over the other but interrogating the relation between the two” (5). In cultural studies, “culture is understood both as a way of life… and a whole range of cultural practices” (5). Thus “culture” refers to what people learn, either consciously or unconsciously, from their observations and experiences in the world. As people interact with each other, they not only establish meaning and cultural norms but also dominant discourses, ways of speaking about their culture and themselves, that shape practices and attitudes.
My mom’s choice to donate peach pie and my love for peach and peach-raspberry pies, is worth reflecting upon. I said earlier that I don’t consider peaches a “basic” food item in my life. Yet, as I spent time writing this blog post, I realized just how important fresh, Ontario grown peaches are in my life. Peach pie is different. It’s special. And while I’m willing to make a raspberry pie from frozen raspberries because I know it’ll turn out, I have not had success with frozen peaches meaning I only make this pie during the late summer months. While I initially balked at Nutella’s choice of dessert for the province, I realize now that they are highlighting an important economic and distinguishing element of Ontario and Canadian cuisine. The Niagara Peninsula is one of two places in Canada where peaches can successfully be grown commercially. And yet, peaches don’t originate from Ontario or Canada. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, this fruit that is native to China became an important crop in Ontario in the 1880s. Today, the Niagara Peninusula is a huge producer of peaches. Yet are not peaches are not only now a major element of the Ontario economy, but they are also a major part of traditional foods throughout the country. This establishment of ingredients as “staples” or “basic” or “normal” has larger cultural consquences. In this way, peaches are another example of a food that has been part of a larger colonial project. We’ll talk more about the politics of food and food as a colonial tool in future blogs. In the meantime, if you’re interested, check out James Murton’s work on apples in Histoire social/Social History or “John Bull and Sons: The Empire Marketing Board and the Creation of a British Imperial Food System” in Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History.
In the same way as individual ingredients can become part of a cultural fabric so too can the foods we make with them. At some point, the organizers of the Astorville Picnic decided that fruit pies were a staple part of the annual meal. They didn’t, even when people donated items, extend their definition of “dessert” to include bars or squares or anything other than pie. This decision says a lot about how the community used dessert to affirm, remember, and recreate the concept of a “good” meal and shows how the community also resisted other, very good, options that may have included others. Essentially, if you didn’t know how to make pie, you didn’t donate one and, even in 2023, the last year the Astorville Picnic was held, knowing how to roll pie dough was recognized as an asset. Not that anyone was excluded, everyone was welcome and there were often people with no or limited pie-making knowledge helping out, but ultimately, everyone who participated came to support an established, cultural practice.
Everything about a pie: the ingredients, the content, the presentation, says something about the maker. Every time I make a pie, I reinforce ideas of “good” food. That I only make peach pie when the fruit is in season and coming from Southern Ontario, but will make raspberry and apple pies throughout the year with fruit that has been shipped from out-of-country, also says important things about how I view the world - whether I recognize it or not.
These are the politics of foods.
This is how food is like a language (See “I speak food and read food - and so do you!”)
This is how food shapes identity.
Pies are part of a collective practices but still allow for individuality to shine through
Peach Pie
Blanch peaches to remove the skin and cut them into small slices.
Using your favourite pie dough recipe (I use the Standard Pie Dough Recipe in the Five Roses Cookbook), line the bottom of your pie plate with dough. Allow the dough to be bigger than the plate.
Add sliced peaches, 2/3 of a cup of granulated sugar, and Minute Tapioca (about 2-3 tablespoons).
Add top layer of pie dough. Steam needs to escape the pie as it cooks so be sure to cut your own unique pattern into the pie top or create a lattice top or cut shapes with cookie cutters.
Bake at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 minutes then reduce the heat to 350 for 30 minutes or until the crust is brown and the juice in middle of the pie has started to bubble.
Enjoy!
To make Peach-Raspberry Pie, cut back on the amount of peaches and add raspberries. You’ll want to increase the sugar to cut the sourness of the raspberries.
Nutella’s Peach Crumble
I wanted to share that my daughter made the Nutella Peach Crumble and it was good! I had never considered adding Nutella to a crumble before, but it was a nice touch. We did also serve it with vanilla ice cream - something more familiar and that people already associated with crumble. More about Nutella in future blogs as it’s a food item I tie to my German heritage.
Nutella’s Peach Crumble
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