In Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, Tom Waits observes that his parents’ generation was the coffee and pie generation. I discovered recently that this combination is not just about taste. It is about the competing influence of two very powerful drugs. Those drugs are butter and caffeine. I baked a pie for the first time on Sunday, well two pies actually. And there is a LOT of butter in a pie crust. The pie experts with whom I have consulted felt that perhaps I used a bit too much butter, making the crust a little too heavy. My pie-baking accomplice made her crust out of shortening, and then being scientist types we made some pies with shortening bottoms and butter tops, and some with pure shortening and some with pure butter, etc etc. Everyone who was lucky enough to get some of the shortening/butter combination felt that this was the winner, so I think the secret may be to mix the shortening and butter in the crust before you roll it out, because then it will be flaky AND tasty.

If anyone needs proof that butter is an addictive substance, witness how easily I was distracted from the point of my little essay, which is that a delicious strawberry-rhubarb pie (YUM) with a little too much butter is one heck of a sedative. I’ve been working on the butter/butter pie for the whole week now and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten so much sleep in my life. I love pie, but I can’t sleep that much, so clearly pie is meant to be consumed with coffee. This is something our grandparents understood – along with how to make 17,000 other kinds of pastries and desserts – something that was nearly lost because the subsequent generation, Tom Waits and all his beat poet friends, just wanted to be “cool” with their cigarettes and dark smoky cafes, and their glossolalic poetry. I can appreciate all that, especially Tom Waits, but I personally just can’t follow in their jittery, jittery footsteps.

Does my generation have a definitive pair? Cigarettes and irony, perhaps, to judge by all the skinny pale unhealthy indie rocker hipsters swarming through Oakland these days.

(cdm | PieAndCoffee)