Scratch

By Zoe Leonard

Xue-li Huang was going to make an apple pie from scratch. She came to this decision after being humiliated for showing up to a Friendsgiving celebration with a store-bought apple pie. Her brother had called her the night before asking her to check for a mistake in his company’s books— they were missing over $800. It took her late into the night to find the mistake, and when she woke up at 11 the next day, she remembered the annual Friendsgiving with her old sorority girlfriends at Carla’s house and cursed herself for not remembering sooner. The dinner started at 5, and she had to pick her mother up from the bus station at 12, so she had to leave immediately and stop at Costco sometime before dinner. “Oh, Shelly!” said Carla as she opened the door. “Come in, what did you bring? Apple pie? How wonderful! I can take that from you.” Xue-li smiled weakly but did not offer the pie. She had put it in a ceramic dish to make it easier on the eyes and to put into the oven, but she hadn’t removed the plastic cover. “It’s from Costco,” she said. “Sorry, I didn’t have time to make anything.”

For a moment Xue-li saw Carla’s mouth twist into a grimace. “No, of course,” said Carla sweetly, nodding her head. “We’re all so busy nowadays, never enough time to relax with friends. But that’s why we’re here! Come in,” she said again. “Why don’t you put it with the other desserts?” Xue-li nodded and weaved through the room, brushing by her old sorority sisters, each one greeting her, “Hey Shelley!” or “Shelley’s here!” or “So glad you could make it!” She put the pie down with the others— pumpkin, pecan, another apple, and all in glass or ceramic dishes, scraps of black crust burnt on to the pan. Xue-li put down her pie and joined the party. When it was time for dessert, Carla said, “Shelley and I both brought apple pie, but I baked mine from scratch.” “My pie is from scratch too,” said another woman. “Oh, and mine,” piped another. “Yes, I think they’re all from scratch,” said Carla. “Well, all except . . .” Xue-li took a slice from her pie and brought the rest home in shame.

The next day, Xue-li quit her job, sold her apartment in Harrisburg, and moved back into her childhood home to live with her mother on their arable three-acre property just north of the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. She cut up a Honeycrisp apple for her mother, since they were her favorite, and saved the seeds. She placed the seeds inside a wet paper towel and put that wet paper towel in a Ziploc bag by the window. After a few days, they began to germinate. She separated the sprouts, planted them in medium-sized sod pots, and cared for them on the back porch until they became veritable saplings. When she cut away the sod pots, she found that the roots had grown so dense that they resembled a wicker basket. She transferred the saplings to spots in the yard. After planting the saplings, Xue-li took an ax out of her late father’s shed and used it to chop down a dying oak tree on the edge of her property. She cleaned the trunk and split the logs into uniform pieces of lumber that she used to make a fence around a 16-by-16 foot area of garden space. She plowed the ground and planted wheat seeds and sugar beets. The sugar beets were all eaten by rabbits, so she bought a basset hound and named him Zhao

Tu Zi. She trained him to kill rabbits while she planted sugarcane instead of beets, and meanwhile tended her wheat and apple trees. She organized and cleaned her late father’s office and installed fans, lights, and tables to grow nutmeg, allspice, and cinnamon plants. They wouldn’t grow well outside, but could grow into a practical-sized shrub if kept well indoors. She ordered the plant starters online and repotted them in some of her mother’s unused ceramics. Xue-li’s mother always watered the plants on Saturdays, though Xueli would have watered them herself. She knew her mother’s habits, and if Xue-li watered the spice plants, her mother would not check before watering them again. One of the allspice plants was lost by overwatering. Xueli left the spice plants in her mother’s hands, where they thrived and radiated a delicious autumn aroma all year round. Xue-li used more of the lumber to create a square wooden bucket, 2 feet on all sides with a half-foot wall that sloped outwards. She went down to the river with a wagon and brought back two giant flat rocks, which she chipped away at and whittled into two stone disks, each a foot in diameter. She attached one disk to the bottom of the wooden bucket

and carved a donut-like hole in the other stone. She put the donut-shaped stone on top of the other flat stone, then attached a wooden handle to the top stone. This is how she crafted a millstone to grind the wheat from her harvest into flour. She drove her mother all the way down to the ocean one weekend and gathered jugs of seawater while her mother waded in up to her ankles. Back at home, she boiled the water down until it became a salty sea slush, then dried it in the oven until it became salt sheets, then ground them up with a mortar and pestle until they became sea salt. She stored the salt in a jar. In a similar process of reducing and grinding, she chopped up her sugar cane and boiled it down until it became cane syrup, then separated out the plant matter and reduced the syrup down into almost pure sugar. She baked and dried the sugary syrup, then ground it up into fine crystals and stored it in a clearly labeled jar next to the sea salt. She bought a few hens from a local farmer, nailed together a chicken coop, and painted it red with a yellow roof. She trained Zhao Tu Zi to leave them alone and put up a wire fence so that foxes couldn’t get in. She

cleaned up the barn and bought some hay and a young cow from the same farmer she bought the hens from. She named the cow Jasmine. She kissed Jasmine on the nose and brushed her hair and grew a close bond with her, so that when Xue-li milked her she stood as happily and still as a tree stump. The hens produced eggs daily, which Xue-li’s mother considered a great boon upon her kitchen, and the milk, which also came daily, was given freely to appreciative neighbors. Xue-li used a hand-carved dowel rod and glass jar to churn some milk and sea salt together into a thick and fluffy butter. It took 9 years for the apple trees to begin bearing heavy, sweet fruit. That November, Xue-li picked Honey-crisp apples. She cut them into slices; then combined flour, salt, sugar, and butter into dough; kneaded; then rolled it out into a thin crust. She laid the crust into a glass pie dish and cut away the excess. She mixed the apples with sugar, flour, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice, and poured the filling into the pie. She laid on the top crust, brushed it with a beaten egg, and sprinkled sugar on top. She made four seed-shaped slits in the crust and baked it in the oven for an hour until the pie was flaky

and golden. “Shelly!” said Carla as she opened the door, “Come in, that pie smells wonderful! I wanted to make a pie this year too, but I just didn’t have enough time to cook—the girls had their dance recitals yesterday.” Xue-li stepped inside. The kitchen counter was packed with aluminum-covered dishes and pre-packaged treats. “Did you make anything from scratch?” she asked Carla.

“No, we did catering this year. I was just so busy—” “Everyone’s so busy,” said Xue-li. “I made my pie from scratch. Entirely from scratch. I grew the apples, and milled the flour, and churned the butter from my cow, and used an egg from my hen, and collected the salt, and reduced the sugar from cane, and even grew and dried the spices.” “Why, Shelly, that’s—!” “I know, but I can’t stay. I have another dinner to get to, but I wanted to bring this pie for you to at least admire, since I know you love baking from scratch. Sorry you can’t have a taste.” Xue-li shrugged and left. She returned home, where her mother, brother, sister-in-

law, and two young nieces were waiting for her with roasted duck and sweet potatoes. They gobbled down the entire pie and used their forks to scrape gooey cinnamon filling off their plates.