Pie — $3.14 a slice for 𝞹 Day

It’s Pi Day — also Pie Day. We celebrate 𝞹. And Zingerman’s Bakehouse offers slices for $3.14.

As you probably learned in elementary math classes, 𝞹 is the ratio of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. The symbol 𝞹 (the Greek letter, Pi) has been used to represent this ratio since 1706, though the mathematical ratio had been known for centuries. In fact: “As a ratio, pi has been around since Babylonian times, but it was the Greek geometer Archimedes, some 2,300 years ago, who first showed how to rigorously estimate the value of pi.” (source) 

Pi Day celebrates this fundamental mathematical constant, and just for fun, pies — which are circular — are the perfect food to eat for this.

I bought two slices of pie for our lunch.

And for the next holiday:

Purim is March 23-24 this year. Zingerman’s has the classic hamentaschen.

Photos © 2024 mae sander

Happy Pi Day

 

Pi Day Pizza

 

PI Day Today, 3/14: A Repost from the Past

From 2015: Let's Celebrate π!

Today [I wrote 6 years ago] is 3/14/15. On that date, I scheduled this post to appear at 9:26 AM. That echoes the maximum number of digits I can use of π, the most famous irrational number: 3.1415926.... Blogger doesn't allow specification of seconds so I can't get two more digits. Every other year in the century, the digits of π are just echoed by 3/14, not the year. Pi Day is a recent invention so nobody celebrated on 3/14/1592 at 6:53 AM. There weren't very accurate clocks back then anyway.

I don't know if I will bake a pie later today, but that's what is traditional for Pi Day. After all, PIE is not only a homophone for PI but also, as everyone should know, π is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius, and a pie is circular of course. There are many ways to celebrate Pi Day, such as the 3.14 mile race in our town today, with pie served at the end. One participant in the race will be Riley McLincha, a Michigan native who was in the Guinness World Record Book in 1978 for memorizing 7,500 digits of Pi, according to the Ann Arbor News.

More mathematically: after 3.1415926535897, the digits of π go on indefinitely. π is not just irrational (that means it's not able to be expressed as a fraction), but also transcendental (that means it's not "algebraic"). I mention this with apologies to readers among my friends and relatives who already know the math far better than I do. In an op ed in today's New York Times, Manil Suri points out:

"Pi, being the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is manifested all around us. For instance, the meandering length of a gently sloping river between source and mouth approaches, on average, pi times its straight-line distance. Pi reminds us that the universe is what it is, that it doesn’t subscribe to our ideas of mathematical convenience." 

Lots of people have tried to get their minds around the concept. To quote an article titled "The Secret Jewish History of Pi" from yesterday's Forward:

"In an episode of the original 'Star Trek,' Mr. Spock — played by the late, great Jewish actor Leonard Nimoy — commands an evil computer that has taken over the life support system of the Starship Enterprise to compute Pi to the last digit. Spock therefore outwitted the murderous cyborg, which wound up self-destructing, because, as Spock explained, 'the value of Pi is a transcendental figure without resolution.' ... 

The great Maimonides: “The ratio of the diameter of the circle and its circumference are unknown and can never be discussed with accuracy,” he wrote in the 12th century. 'This is not a lack of knowledge on our part, as the idiots think, but rather it is that by its nature this thing is unknown, and by virtue of its reality cannot be known, and it is not possible to speak of it … its actual value cannot be perceived.'”

And (with more apologies to those in the know) homophone or homonymn is the term for two words that sound alike but are spelled differently: like PI and PIE! 

Pi Day Pies from a google image screen capture.

Miriam's π Shirt and some Thanksgiving pies a few years ago.

Actually 22 July (22/7) is a better Pi Day on the other 99 years of the century, as well as being my birthday. I always felt kind of transcendental. Hope you eat some pie!

Blog post © 2015, 2021 by mae sander.

Happy Pi Day!

Apple Pie that was for sale at Argus Farm Market yesterday.
I don't know what we will be doing to celebrate (if anything).

What I've been cooking

Chocolate Fudge Pie in the oven.

Last week I wrote about pie for Pi Day (here: Pi Day Discovery and Zingerman's Pie). This week, I tried the recipe for Cruchon's Fudge Pie that was in that post. This recipe, which I found online, didn't specify what size pie was intended. Fortunately, I guessed that the original proportions were for a large pie, so I scaled down for the small pie (7" or 8") illustrated above. The texture of the fudge filling was very nice, and it tasted quite good.

Browning potatoes & carrots for corned beef hash.

Corned beef hash made from the Saint Patrick's Day corned beef, browned onions, hash brown potatoes, and a few carrots.

One more corned beef dinner: sandwiches with turkey, corned beef, and cole slaw on Zingerman's bread.
The slaw ingredients were chopped cabbage, grated carrots & ginger root, mayo, keffir, a dash of hot sauce, & caraway seed.

I rarely write up the meals that we eat on an everyday basis. This week I decided to describe some of the simple meals we ate. Two of our dinners were salmon broiled on skewers with portobello mushroom quarters one night, and broiled flank steak with heart-of-palm salad including olives, lettuce, and cherry tomatoes on another night. The best lunch I made consisted of a tabbouleh salad containing parsley, bulgar, tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil (recipe amalgamated from several online sources) and home-made hummus from chickpeas, tahini, and Trader Joe's pickled red peppers.

Pi Day Discovery and Zingerman's Pie

A long time ago, we lived in Berkeley, California. So long ago that the "Berkeley Food Revolution" hadn't happened yet, and there were only a few good restaurants. If you wanted good food, you crossed the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. In Berkeley, only two restaurants had a high reputation: Cruchon's and The Pot Luck, which the famous food critic Herb Cain called "the only San Francisco style restaurant in the East Bay." Both restaurants were a little pricy for us, but we managed to eat there occasionally.

Cruchon's, a short walk from where we lived, was known for a very large selection of pie. I particularly remember that they made a fudge pie, which was like a brownie in a pie crust, and several fruit pies. I think the pie selection varied each day, but there were always a lot of appealing choices. Maybe I first tasted pecan pie there.

Since today is Pi Day (because mathematics, you know, π = 3.14) I was thinking about Cruchon's pie, and looked it up. There's not much about it online -- I already knew Cruchon's was "a notable sandwich, salad, and pie restaurant near the Berkeley campus." However, I did discover that the founder of both Cruchon's and the Pot Luck was a man named Hank Rubin (1916-2011). According to his obituary, he was the "father of the Berkeley Food Revolution and a well-known writer about food and wine." (source)

Rubin's fascinating  obituary appeared in a journal called "The Volunteer" which was "Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade." Rubin, I learned, "was a lifelong advocate for social justice — a passion that drove him to leave UCLA in his junior year as a pre-med student and enlist in the first major fight against fascism in Europe, the Spanish Civil War, where he fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a contingent of American volunteers." His Berkeley restaurants, founded in the early 1960s, "were the first restaurants in the Bay Area to be fully integrated by race and gender."

I remember only the pie and a vague image of what it looked like inside the restaurant. Funny that I can't find a single picture online. The only trace other than the obituaries is that The Berkeley Historical Plaque Project placed a plaque on the former site of Rubin's Pot Luck restaurant, and included a brief bio, which says:

"At Cruchon’s, where sandwich makers were visible to diners, Rubin was undeterred by a loss of customers, angry protests, and threats of a boycott in response to his employing a staff that was mixed by gender and race and included longhaired students." (link)

The Berkeley Plaque Project also quoted a recipe for the fudge pie:

Cruchon Fudge Pie recipe given to Carole Joffe 

“Melt together: 6 tablespoons butter; 3 oz bittersweet chocolate, mixing well, one and one half cups sugar, 3 med eggs moderately beaten; 1/2 tablespoon vanilla—turn into unbaked pie shell bake at 375 for one and one half hours, uneven…” 

“Uneven” refers to keeping the oven door open part of the time. (link)

That's my Pi Day memory for this year! Here's what I bought and am eating today:

At Zingerman's Bakehouse: Slices of Pie for $3.14 apiece. Lemon, pecan, berry medley or apple.

Playing with Food

"The toast will be ready in a minute," said Len, suspecting that I was impatient before breakfast this morning.

"I'm just having fun arranging butter and jam on my plate. No rush." I answered.

Playing with food! As I continued buttering my toast and then peeling a tangerine, I thought about how much fun it is to play with food. When you peel the tangerine, you have to pull off all those little white stringy things one by one. It's compelling sometimes. Do you ever smear peanut butter on a graham cracker and then squish it with the other half of the graham cracker? Did you ever microwave cocoa with marshmallows on top and watch them swell up? I hope you didn't set your microwave on fire. Do you think it's fun to whack the catsup bottle? As in the poem The Catsup Bottle by Ogden Nash "First a little/ Then a lottle."

Cooking can be like playing with food, sometimes. Do you like fooling around with the toppings for a pizza? Last night, I spread the sauce with a silicone basting brush and I arranged the toppings in patterns, especially the artichoke hearts. Watching the dough as the flour mixer forms a ball in the food processor is fun. Kneading the dough is kind of amusing too -- some people like it more than I do. (Yesterday was Pi Day, and I didn't think I would have pie but I made a pizza after all.)

During my actual childhood, my mother didn't tolerate a lot of fooling around at the dinner table, but I guess I tried a few things. I used to enjoy mushing up the three separate dishes that composed one of the meals she often made: salmon croquettes, mashed potatoes, and peas (that would have been canned peas; soft, for mushing). I'm sure there were a few other foods or combinations I would have liked to fool around with. My sister probably remembers more.

But I'm a grownup now. I shouldn't play with food. Unless I'm cooking. Like mashing potatoes. The other night, I made twice-baked potatoes. This means I got to scrape the potato out after the first baking, then mash it with butter and browned onions and kefir, then smash the mixture into balls and stuff them into the potato shells, and finally, bake them again, covered with melty cheese. Meanwhile I grated carrots and chopped red cabbage for a side salad, not exactly playing, but almost.

I can think of other things that allow a cook to play with food -- legitimately! Like making tuna salad, egg salad, deviled eggs, or almost anything smushed with mayonnaise, which is a very playful substance as any child knows. Like making ice cream. Like forming a messy meat mixture into meatballs, which you can roll between the palms of your hands. Like the tense moment when you have added flour to white sauce and it forms a smooth paste, not a lumpy mess. It's all play.

Happy Pi Day

I'm probably not going to bake a pi-themed pie today. Or any pie. So above is a screen capture from Google images.
On an earlier Pi-Day post, I calculated some useful pie-making numbers using π -- you probably remember them from basic math class: first the basic calculations. The area of a circle is π (approximately 3.14) times the radius squared. Therefore:

• 8 inch round pans have diameter 8, radius 4 so they have 3.14 x 4 x 4 = 50 square inches of area
• 9 inch round = 63.5 sq. in.
• 10 inch round = 87.5 sq. in.

Square pans have the following areas:

• 8 inch square = 64 sq. in.
• 9 inch square = 81 sq. in.
• 9 by 13 inch = 117 sq. in.

If you pour in filling to the same depth, the amount of pie filling or cake batter you need is the same when you fill pans of the same area, assuming that the round pans have straight, not sloping sides. Sloping sides add a bit of unpredictability. These are useful results:

• An 8 inch square and a 9 inch round are virtually identical in their need for filling or batter.
• A 9 inch square and a 10 inch round are less than 10% apart.
• Two 8 inch squares are very close to a 9 x 13 inch rectangle.
• NOT equivalent: a 10 inch pie with sloping sides probably holds close to twice as much filling as an 8 inch pie.

UPDATE: the most extreme pie movie I've ever seen:

The Pie

Making pie dough in my very old Cuisinart food processor:
Top row: the dough ingredients spin around, then come together in a ball.
Bottom row: the venerable booklet from the manufacturer, with recipe,
my pie weights, and the pie shell just baked.

Yesterday, as promised, I made a pie for Pi Day. I decided to keep track of what I did in case I want to do it again. 

First, I made the pie shell, as illustrated above, in my shallow 10-inch pie plate. (The filling recipe would also be ok for a deeper 9-inch pie.)

Then I made the filling and completed the pie. I tried using the microwave to make the filling, and succeeded! Using the microwave requires one's undivided attention for around 10 minutes, but is otherwise much easier and quicker than using a saucepan and worrying that the filling will scorch on the bottom.

Pi-Day Pie

Lemon Pie Filling

Ingredients
3/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
grated zest of 2 organic lemons
3/4 cup sugar
9 tablespoons butter (1 stick + 1 tablespoon)
3 eggs
3 egg yolks

Process

1. Whisk the eggs and yolks until thick and homogeneous.
2. In a 4 cup or larger heat-proof measuring cup or similar container place the lemon juice, lemon zest, and sugar. Cut butter into small pieces and add to container. Microwave on 70% power for 2 minutes, repeating 2 or 3 times, stirring after each time, until the butter begins to melt. Stir mixture off heat until butter is entirely melted. 
3. Whisk a small amount of the lemon mixture into the eggs to warm them. Gradually combine the two mixtures, whisking them together in the heat-proof container. Return container to the microwave oven and again heat on 70% power 2 minutes. Whisk mixture again. Repeat the 2 minutes of heating 2 or 3 times until the mixture becomes thick, whisking after each time. Watch the heating process very carefully so that the mixture does not boil over!

To finish the pie: Pour the lemon curd into a baked pie shell, smooth the top of the filling, and bake for 5 minutes in a 350º oven. Allow the pie to cool for a few hours so that you can cut it into firm slices.

Pi Day: Once in 100 years

Let's Celebrate π!

Today is 3/14/15 and I've scheduled this post to appear at 9:26. That echoes the maximum number of digits I can use of π, the most famous irrational number: 3.1415926.... Blogger doesn't allow specification of seconds so I can't get two more digits. Every other year in the century, the digits of π are just echoed by 3/14, not the year. Pi Day is a recent invention so nobody celebrated on 3/14/1592 at 6:53 AM. There weren't very accurate clocks back then anyway.

I don't know if I will bake a pie later today, but that's what is traditional for Pi Day. After all, PIE is not only a homophone for PI but also, as everyone should know, π is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius, and a pie is circular of course. There are many ways to celebrate Pi Day, such as the 3.14 mile race in our town today, with pie served at the end. One participant in the race will be Riley McLincha, a Michigan native who was in the Guinness World Record Book in 1978 for memorizing 7,500 digits of Pi, according to the Ann Arbor News.

More mathematically: after 3.1415926535897, the digits of π go on indefinitely. π is not just irrational (that means it's not able to be expressed as a fraction), but also transcendental (that means it's not "algebraic"). I mention this with apologies to readers among my friends and relatives who already know the math far better than I do. In an op ed in today's New York Times, Manil Suri points out:

"Pi, being the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is manifested all around us. For instance, the meandering length of a gently sloping river between source and mouth approaches, on average, pi times its straight-line distance. Pi reminds us that the universe is what it is, that it doesn’t subscribe to our ideas of mathematical convenience." 

Lots of people have tried to get their minds around the concept. To quote an article titled "The Secret Jewish History of Pi" from yesterday's Forward:

"In an episode of the original 'Star Trek,' Mr. Spock — played by the late, great Jewish actor Leonard Nimoy — commands an evil computer that has taken over the life support system of the Starship Enterprise to compute Pi to the last digit. Spock therefore outwitted the murderous cyborg, which wound up self-destructing, because, as Spock explained, 'the value of Pi is a transcendental figure without resolution.' ... 

The great Maimonides: “The ratio of the diameter of the circle and its circumference are unknown and can never be discussed with accuracy,” he wrote in the 12th century. 'This is not a lack of knowledge on our part, as the idiots think, but rather it is that by its nature this thing is unknown, and by virtue of its reality cannot be known, and it is not possible to speak of it … its actual value cannot be perceived.'”

And (with more apologies to those in the know) homophone or homonymn is the term for two words that sound alike but are spelled differently: like PI and PIE! 

Pi Day Pies from a google image screen capture.

Miriam's π Shirt and some Thanksgiving pies a few years ago.

Actually 22 July (22/7) is a better Pi Day on the other 99 years of the century, as well as being my birthday. I always felt kind of transcendental. Hope you eat some pie!

Quiche = Pie for Pi Day

Here's the pie -- in this case a Quiche Lorraine -- for this year's Pi Day, today, 3-14. I like the idea of round food for Pi Day! I baked the big letter PI separately and added it as a decoration.

For my quiche I started with my old standby piecrust recipe from the Cuisinart cookbook. I adapted this evening's method as well as filling from Julia Child's first great cookbook. That was the first quiche recipe I ever made, to me the authentic and original (not any of those debased concoctions from the 1980s!) Tonight, heretically, I used skim milk in place of cream.

Below you can see the ingredients, ready to assemble: a partly-baked 8 inch pie shell, a mixture of eggs, milk and spice, and some lightly browned bacon, for which I used pancetta. Note that pancetta is a less-heavily smoky bacon than the usual kind, so I didn't blanch it. Blanching smoky American bacon was a step that Julia Child needed because the lighter European style bacon varieties weren't then available here. So I don't feel that was a heretical choice at all!

I arranged the bacon on the crust, poured in the eggs, dotted the top with a few pats of butter, and baked it as directed. It did puff up and was very delicate and good!

The first time I ever ate quiche was at my friend Olga's college apartment. She was such a sophisticate! I had never heard of it, but not long afterwards, I also tried quiche in France, and then came back to learn to cook French food from the recently-published Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The book Real Men Don't Eat Quiche was published quite a lot later, after the crimes against quiche that were propagated by second-tier restaurants that made it days in advance and thought you could just warm it up and put a leaf next to it and call it French. No way. This is the real deal.

Pi Day Reposted

From two years ago, for Pi Day -- 3-14. Circular food. Also see this and this.

Breakfast: a round omelet, round tomato slices

Lunch: 2 Pi inches as measured along the edge of the 8 inch pita bread

Dinner: Chicken Pie with a mashed potato crust AND the Pi Day masterpiece --

Be-Bop-A-Re-Bop Rhubarb Pie

Happy Pi Day

Elaine and I baked a pie for Pi Day (3-14).

Pi Day pies and other round food

Breakfast: a round omelet, round tomato slices

Lunch: 2 Pi inches as measured along the edge of the 8 inch pita bread

Dinner: Chicken Pie with a mashed potato crust AND the Pi Day masterpiece --

Be-Bop-A-Re-Bop Rhubarb Pie

Pi in the Kitchen

Happy Pi, Day!

In honor of Pi Day, I'm going to use pi to solve a frequent baker's problem: what size baking pans are equivalent? While actual pie pans have sloping sides, no one bakes a pie crust in a square or straight-sided pan if they can help it, because the crust will get wrinkly. So the problem occurs with straight-sided pans for baking cakes, and with how much filling goes in a pie.

Obviously, if you want the same depth of batter when you change pans for a cake recipe, you need to find a substitute pan with close to the same number of square inches of area. (The amount of frosting also scales something like that, but would vary depending on if you iced the sides of the cake. OR used jam between the layers.) In any case, what we need to start with is the number of square inches per pan type.

First the basic calculations. The area of a circle is π times the radius squared. So:

8 inch round pans have diameter 8, radius 4 so they have 3.14 x 4 x 4 = 50 square inches of area
9 inch round = 63.5 sq. in.
10 inch round = 87.5 sq. in.
8 inch square = 64 sq. in.
9 inch square = 81 sq. in.
9 by 13 inch = 117 sq. in.

Some equivalents:

• An 8 inch square and a 9 inch round are virtually identical.
• A 9 inch square and a 10 inch round are less than 10% apart.
• Two 8 inch squares are very close to a 9 x 13 inch rectangle.

But here's another important consequence of this arithmetic: if you make the right amount of filling for a round pie in one size (8- 9- or 10- inches in diameter), it will be really wrong for a pie only one inch different in diameter. The sloping sides of most pie pans make the difference even worse: a 10 inch pie probably holds close to twice as much filling as an 8 inch pie. The consequence also applies to the amount of pie crust that is needed. Not intuitive, exactly, unless you are one of my many mathematician readers.

Did you wonder why today is Pi Day? Because π = 3.14 and today is March 14. Actually 22 July (22/7) is a better Pi Day as well as being my birthday. I always felt kind of transcendental. And the best Pi Minute will be in a few years at 3/14/15 9:26 AM. I guess the best Pi Day ever would have been back in the Renaissance before sufficiently accurate clocks --

3/14/1592 6:53 AM

Thanks to my whole family for long discussions of this important Day.