Are There Any More Cookies?: A Greek Tragedy on Pi Day

So many of the best Greek tragedies, and really tragedies in general, rest on the idea of hubris. Generally one thinks of hubris, if one thinks of it at all, as a folly of youth, but I'm here to tell you a tale of hubris from yesterday morning, starring me and a pie crust.

Our story begins, as so many do, with a tiny act. See, a few months ago I bought my friend a Harry Potter spatula at Williams Sonoma, and let them email my receipt rather than printing a paper one. Since that day, I receive one to three emails from Williams Sonoma a day telling me about sales and reasons why I should rush to their store to by four hundred dollar toasters and hundred dollar mixing bowls. Yesterday morning, for Pi Day, they sent me one about "6 Pie Essentials", which I casually deleted and then tweeted about.

Thanks for your thoughtful email, Williams Sonoma, but I don't really need 6 pie-making essentials right now.

Please email when you have toilet paper.

The stage is now set to move on with our story.

Around lunch time yesterday, after a morning of cleaning, laundry, reading, and video games, I realized that I didn't have any pie to celebrate Pi Day. I thought about running to the store to pick up a small one, but then remembered that I'm supposed to be practicing social distancing right now, and trying to stay in my apartment instead of running out to the store whenever the impulse hits me.

"What if I just made a pie?" I thought, surveying the contents of my cabinets. Mixed in with a dozen boxes of Jello, I noticed a box of instant chocolate pudding and pie filling. "All I need, really, is a pie crust. People make pie crust all the time. How hard can it be? I mean, I own a hundred cookbooks. One of them must have a recipe."

So, hours after casually mocking the idea that there are pie essentials that I might need help with (making pie crust is probably one of them), I decide to make a pie.

Hubris.

Now, on with our tragedy. I started by surveying the book case where I keep most of my cookbooks:

My parents got that bookcase as a wedding gift. It has survived a dozen moves over the years, and the only damage is a chip in the corner of one of the sliding door panels. It holds most of my cookbooks, although there is a shelf of overflow cookbooks in the second bedroom, which I sometimes grandly refer to as The Library. I picked through for a few minutes, and found a basic recipe for pie crust. I had all the ingredients, so I preheated the oven and got started on the pie crust.

The recipe said that the butter needed to be really cold, so I cubed it and then put it in the freezer for ten minutes:

Then I prepared to cut the butter into the flour and salt:

After adding the ice cold water, the recipe insisted that I now had pie dough.

It didn't look like pie dough. It looked like a pile of sad ruins, but I had now used butter and flour on it during our time of social distance, which meant I shouldn't waste it to just make pudding. I soldiered onward, and followed the instructions, which said to roll out my dough.

The recipe gave no indication that the dough could stick to the rolling pin. When I talked to my mom this morning about it she casually said, "Oh, you didn't put enough flour on your rolling pin," but the recipe didn't say to put any flour on the rolling pin. I pointed this out, and mom added, "Everyone knows you put flour on the rolling pin."

I guess everyone doesn't know, but maybe it was one of the six essential tips that I, in my hubris, deleted and mocked.

Eventually, I gave up on trying to roll out the dough, and just plopped it into the pan and pressed it into shape with my fingers.

This is not ideal pie crust.

I baked it anyway and it came out even worse.

Actual bakers are probably staring at that in horror, but I was all in at this point. I waited for it to cool, then filled it with my newly mixed chocolate pie filling and put it in the fridge. The finished product looked mostly like a pie, with sloppy edges.