​Based on brisk sales at work, it appears we need a little Christmas cookie, right this very minute. Sugar cookies are in the forefront being aggressively chased by gingerbread. It is a race we never can win.
 
I was always more of a rugelach girl, more comfortable with a cookie slightly akin to pie. Rugelach dough is tender, a cream cheese circle happy to embrace cinnamon sugar, plump raisins, and walnuts. Although fiddly to prepare, at Hanukkah, rugelach was the cookie yin to Barton’s chocolate gelt yang. Save for Spritz cookies, Christmas cookies were foreign territory. Jessie’s black-handled Mirro Aluminum Cookie Press with 12 interchangeable discs lived in the depths of one of the knotty-pine kitchen cabinets. In December, Jessie unearthed the gadgetry, inviting me to participate. It was never my forte; I didn’t have the right touch. Spritz-cookie-ing required squeezing just enough dough onto the cookie sheet but not too much. Jessie’s cookies were distinctive, easily recognizable. Dogs looked like dogs down to their tails, snowflakes and trees were unmistakable, boasting clean edges. Mine all looked pretty much the same. I was better suited to cut-out cookies, but Jessie had little time or inclination to be (direct quote) “fussin’ with all that icin’ nonsense.” Perhaps she was trying to save me from my future cookie self.
 
My current self must admit that decorating Christmas cookies is something I actually look forward to. Unlike pie, weighty with fruit, screaming hot around the edges, cookies are somewhat manageable. The quantity is totally unmanageable; the retail public actually clamors for thousands of cookies.  The bakery will pump out exactly that; thousands. In my early days at the bakery, I was hired to decorate cookies for the Christmas season. Nine years later, I’ve racked up plenty of miles on the carpal-tunnel-odometer. Every time the piping bag misbehaves, or the Ameri-gel Christmas Red leaves its indelible mark on my fingers, I can’t help but think of Jessie and that black–handled Mirro Aluminum Cookie Press. 

​Our team of butter-sugar-flour enablers have arrived at the other side of Thanksgiving, and not a minute too soon. The am crew overlapped with the pm crew, as days slid seamlessly into nights then back again into daybreak. Wedged elbow to elbow around a worktable covered in scales, mixing bowls, and flats of organic eggs, we crossed the checkerboard linoleum, from bench to walk-in to bench then oven, bruising our hips on every corner of unforgiving stainless steel.
 
Working eight consecutive days in a row makes you a little punchy in the end. Even the convection ovens feel it, taking their own sweet time when you’re tapping your kitchen clogs, or taunting with hotspots when you run downstairs to fetch more pumpkin. Ovens are like children, requiring constant babysitting. Straining to hear the oven timer over the din of the kitchen, it is imperative to stand at the ready, poised to rotate, adjust, and retrieve.
 
Every year there are lessons learned and this Thanksgiving was no different. A few new challenges reared their ugly heads requiring the following notes-to-self.  
 
1. Pizza is truly the official food leading up to Thanksgiving.
 
2. Never underestimate the importance of commercial plastic wrap in a commercial kitchen. Minuscule rolls of Saran Wrap laugh in the face of holidays.
 
3. Hot ovens run too hot, slow ovens are too damn slow. Oven timers think it’s funny to turn themselves off. For this reason, it is imperative to stock your bakery medicine cabinet with plenty of analgesics and anti-inflammatories.
 
4. Oven racks like to glide into place some of the time. When least convenient, they will struggle, splashing hot buttermilk custard in your direction, specifically towards the exposed area where oven mitt ends and bare skin begins.
 
5. You cannot coax pumpkin pies to bake faster. They could care less about your stress level and will show their defiance with unsightly cracks.
 
6. Apple pies appear to be easy going but in fact, they are prima donnas who complain about their delicate complexions being exposed to the top rack of a convection oven.
 
7. Soft apples (I’m looking at you, Cortland) have their place, namely in applesauce. They should best stay home and decline any invitations to the apple pie party.
 
8. Canned pumpkin should have a lift-top tab opening. Canned pumpkin requires
a lift-top tab opening.
 
9. The oven mitt with the hole in it that you swore you threw away will return time and again. You will reach for it and wear it when removing the weightiest, hottest sheet pan from the top shelf of the oven.
 
10. People who don’t eat enough pie on a regular basis are cranky in general and more so when they are told they can’t have a pie because they didn’t order one.
 
11. People who eat lots of pie all the time are less cranky until they are told they can’t have a pie because they didn’t order one.
 
12. Pie seekers who forget to order their pie are sneaky, cajoling, and ultimately belligerent.
 
13. Pie scalping is really a thing amongst pie purchasers with one too many pies.
(This was confirmed by a highly reliable source; someone who witnessed the event outside the bakery.)
 
14. Pie bakers should absolutely squirrel away their preferred non-traditional fruit pie fixings in the freezer. They should bake that pie and eat the leftovers, if any, for breakfast on Black Friday.
 
15. We should seriously consider moving Thanksgiving from November to February 29th.

Let it be known throughout the kitchens of the land; November 15th has been designated “Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day.” Created by the home economists at Whirlpool Home Appliances in 1999, those savvy consumer educators knew what was lurking in the back of our single and double door refrigerators. They also knew that a week or so shy of Thanksgiving, we needed to don our Hazmat suits, fill our buckets with hot, soapy water and face our fridges. The time was ripe, so to speak, to tackle those nearly empty Kozlik’s Canadian mustard jars, to empty the unlabeled Tupperware in the rear of the left hand corner, to throw away the once-sprightly-now-decomposing herbs lurking in the crisper drawer.
 
In 1999, if you needed assistance, it was not uncommon to pick up the phone, dial a toll free number and speak with a customer service representative. Up to your elbows in your best yellow rubber gloves, you could cradle your Nokia or Motorola flip phone in one hand while attempting to realign the shelves and crisper drawers with the other.
 
Over the years, the folks on the receiving end of the toll free line have changed their tune. The hotline has been dismantled, and we’ve been instructed to consult the manuals and literature that accompanied our appliance when it was first delivered. When you’re attempting to put your refrigerator back together without breaking any of the integral parts of the unit, it seems somewhat impractical to remember where those manuals are squirreled away. The unwieldy glass shelves that were easy to remove and scrub down just moments before, now stubbornly refuse to line up within their designated brackets. The door of the refrigerator mostly closes, but doesn’t quite create the airtight seal we are hoping for. This could explain why the home economists at Whirlpool and the customer service representatives at 1-800-FIXMYFRIDGE no longer answer their phones.
 
On a recent foray into both my double-door refrigerator and below ‘see’ level freezer compartment, I encountered a few items that were frost-bitten and forgotten. Both the trash and the recycle bin welcomed these abandoned foodstuffs with open arms. Some things were salvageable, namely an unopened bag of macadamia nuts that had been frozen for safe-keeping, and a bottle of dark amber maple syrup that had been neglected behind three jars of nut butters. Without being judge-y, please understand that some days call for unsalted peanut butter, while others call for crunchy/salty peanut butter and for some, almond butter is the only way to fly. I’m eyeing the almond butter, hesitant about its shelf life. Since the almond butter couple has relocated to the land of Kozlik’s mustards (where they keep an impeccably tidy refrigerator), I debate whether to keep the almond butter or toss it. There’s enough in the jar for a sandwich or two, and the ‘use by’ date is only gently expired.  I’ll keep it for now. Closing the door of the fridge it seals shut, almost. 

I’m watching cubes of cold butter and pounds of all-purpose flour collide with the paddle attachment of the commercial Hobart mixer. Armed with a plastic pitcher of ice-cold water and a splash of gluten-inhibiting cider vinegar, I’m working on my umpteenth round of pie dough. It’s a little bit like a game of jump rope, when you’re waiting patiently for your opportunity to jump in without getting tangled up in the rope. I don’t want the water to get tangled up in the butter and flour until the mixture is the proper consistency; what folks in my line of work refer to as “coarse crumbs with the butter pieces being no larger than the size of a pea.” No one has clarified whether we’re looking for a split pea, or a very young, Le Sueur pea from Minnesota, or your run-of-the-mill frozen pea from the Trader Joe’s freezer case. I want the pie dough to be all of the right things; tender, flaky, and buttery but none of the wrong things; dry, tough, and elastic. There are three more rounds of cold butter and flour taking up space in the walk-in.  Turning off the mixer, I pinch the stubborn butter bits, flattening them and sending them back into the brisée fray. Impatiently, I add water to the mix, stopping and starting the machine, tossing the floury butter bits with my fingers, trying a little more water but not too much. With the persistence of Goldilocks, I gather together the shaggy dough, declaring it ‘just right.’ There’s a clump of unmixed flour and butter at the very bottom of the bowl. Damn. Using a plastic bowl scraper, I empty the dough onto a parchment lined sheet pan and squoosh the wayward flour bits into the mix with a sprinkle of cold water. ‘Just right’ is highly over-rated when the elusive number you're  hoping to capture is upwards of 700.  You might say we’re just warming up.
 
The not-so-funny thing about commercial pie baking for Thanksgiving is the absurdity of the process. Just when you think you’re closing in on 700 plus pie shells for the day before the holiday, the cold harsh reality hits you over the head like the weightiest rolling pin. Before we congratulate ourselves for rolling and crimping hundreds of 9" shells, I remember; every single one of those pastry-lined pie shells has to be filled. My goals for the next two and a half weeks are humble yet critical. If I can limit my forearm oven burns to a minimum, if I remember to defer anything requiring math skills to a calculator, and if I'm strict about keeping a fully charged oven timer close at hand, I should be golden, just like a properly par-baked pie shell.
 
 

It’s a touch too balmy for the last day of October. The weather has been mercurial; chilly in the m​ornings, stretching into the low 70s later in the day. On Halloween at 5 pm, the thermometer hovers at 74 degrees. It’s been raining on and off, vacillating between substantial showers and the kind of drizzle that definitively makes it a bad hair day, even beneath a bandana.
 
There’s a parade winding through our little Village, starting at the top of the main street near the train station, zig-zagging past the movie theatre, the local supermarket, a variety of restaurants, finally ending a little past the bakery. Shop merchants are filling plastic pumpkins, tired pillowcases, and outstretched hands with Halloween candy. The children are equally represented by grown-ups, most sporting elaborate costumes. Even the family pets are outfitted as super heroes, skeletons, and ‘hot’ dogs. My costume is subtle- a pair of black and white checkered chef pants, a starched white button down shirt and a bandana emblazoned with kitchen paraphernalia. I carry one solitary prop; an empty wine bottle. Inspired by my vocation, I am a pie baker at five o’clock, somewhere.

Inching my way towards the car, a pair of high school-ers dressed in inflatable T-Rex costumes are taking up much of the sidewalk. Ducking and weaving, I scoot past, only to sideswipe a man on stilts. Yikes. Out of the fray, there’s a lone trick or treat-er dressed as a Lego. He’s wearing a multi-colored cardboard box on his head, and walking past him, I catch a whiff of craft glue and fresh paint. Alongside the Lego is his mother, her hands spattered with paint that matches the cardboard box. Little Lego and his mother wade into the ocean of costumes, the cardboard box bobbing along against a family decked out as Toy Story. Lego has a near miss with Buzz Lightyear and Woody, but steadies himself.
 
I’m driving with extreme caution, keeping an eye out for trick or treat-ers. There are plenty of distractions along the way. A few blocks from home, a front lawn overrun with an absurd number of Halloween inflatables is snarling traffic. The inflatables are oversized to a fault, better suited to a parade. Cars in front of me are slowing down to take in the inflatable show. I’m losing patience and turn left. There are plenty of sensible decorations on my street; toothy Jack-O-Lanterns grinning from front steps and strings of orange light outlining porches.
 
No sooner do I pull into my driveway than my ears begin to twitch. There is a high pitched wailing coming from the house across the street. My neighbors have fashioned a faux graveyard in their front yard, a tableau of appropriately frightening tombstones draped in cobwebs. It’s difficult to tell how the sound is unleashed but it is on a steady loop, a cross between a rusty hinge and an animal in distress. Its only speed is full throttle and the relentless lamentation is beginning to irritate me. The dwindling bag of Halloween candy in my kitchen still has a few worthy choices. I reach for a Reese’s peanut butter cup. Peeling back the gold foil wrapper, the milk chocolate is soft, a little melty, leaving streaks of chocolate on the wrapper and my fingers. The graveyard soundtrack continues interrupted only by my doorbell.
 
Wiping the chocolate from the corners of my mouth, I answer the door to a black cat and a pumpkin. I drop a few pieces of candy in their bags and watch them walk next door, leaves crunching beneath their feet. There’s not much in the way of trick or treat-ers on foot, maximizing their candy quota by dashing across front lawns and running from house to house. Instead, I’m witnessing a steady cavalcade of cars, stopping just before the intersection to unload a collection of candy seekers, leaving the driver in the car, eyes glued to a cellphone.
 
It is unlikely that my parents would have been the Uber to my trick or treating. Before my older brothers bowed out of the festivities, our Halloween celebration began with a party at school and trick or treating when we returned. Most years, I waited impatiently while my mother finished stitching the last details onto my costume, (this was before hot glue guns) grabbed a quick snack so I wouldn’t perish, and ventured out into the pre-dusk afternoon. We circled the neighborhood together, brothers and sisters with a few friends, never going inside anyone’s house, never eating anything that was homemade, and always being aware that apples had the potential to harbor foreign, dangerous objects. Our feet grew tired before we exhausted our itinerary. It was crystal clear that we would be home before dark; the only kids who ventured out at night were high schoolers, less likely to be gathering candy and according to my parents, more likely to be looking for trouble.
 
We spent the evening emptying our pillowcases and our plastic pumpkins onto the dining room table. Taking inventory of our haul, we discarded anything unwrapped, any stray candy corn that had found its way into the mix, and of course, any apples. We argued and traded, fighting over Pixie Stix, Sweet Tarts, jawbreakers that changed color, Bonomo Turkish Taffy, BB Bats, Double Bubble and Bazooka. Candy necklaces were highly coveted, Mary Janes, not so much. I have no recollection of being told how much or how little to consume, I only remember begrudgingly brushing our teeth as a preventative measure against loathsome cavities. The candy was popular for quite a while until all the good choices had been exhausted leaving us with a few tired Tootsie Rolls, the Mary Janes, the Bit-O-Honeys.
 
Around eight o’clock last night, the wailing from across the street finally ended, restoring peace to our little neighborhood. With the conclusion of Halloween, we are propelled into the thick of the holiday season. I count fewer than thirty days, less than a month to go before Piemageddon. More frightening than the oversized inflatables, the droning graveyard and a bag filled with loose candy corn, I shudder at the thought of it.

Act 4 Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale- Enter Clown
 
“I cannot do’t without counters. Let me see; what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast? Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice, - what will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on…
 
I must have saffron to color the warden pies; mace, dates? – none, that’s out of my note; nutmegs, seven, a race or two of ginger, but that I may beg; four pounds of prunes, and as many of raisins I’ the sun.”
 
My version of pear pie opts for cornmeal and rye in the pastry, cardamom in the filling, and golden raisins, straying from the Warden Pie depicted in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Warden pears were originally grown in Bedfordshire, gathered from the land surrounding Warden Abbey. Shakespeare had a penchant for pears, often peppering his scripts with bawdy and risqué pear references, not always suitable for prime time consumption.
 
I can relate to recipes instructing you to ‘bake your Wardens first in a pie’ (meaning pre-bake) to accommodate rock-hard, unripe fruit. Having only dabbled in Shakespeare in college, I do consider myself more of an authority on unripe pears. Without following the Clown’s recipe to the letter, cue my Pear Pie with Cornmeal/Rye Pastry. You won’t need Spark notes to understand it. The crust bows to rye and cornmeal flour and the filling is weighty with pears and has a good bite from candied ginger. I prefer it for breakfast with a drizzle of maple syrup, but vanilla ice cream makes a fine understudy.
 

Setting the table for Thanksgiving dinner was always a big to-do, almost ceremonial. My father liked to orchestrate, enlisting several sets of hands to expand the antique table to a size that could accommodate a minimum of a dozen, generally more. Consulting first with my mother for a headcount that was always changing, the man who always sat at the head of the table would venture into the cavernous hall closet for additional boards to extend the table. The boards weighed a ton, made of the same dark stained wood as the heirloom table, with each board numbered to ensure a seamless extension. Our dining room chairs with the needlepoint seats had curvy backs and wide legs, too unwieldy for Thanksgiving.  My father dove into the rear of the hall closet to unearth uncomfortable folding chairs with black leatherette seats supported by wooden legs. When unfolded, the chairs were guaranteed to pinch your fingers as you set them in place. My mother accumulated the chairs in the 1960s and 70s when S&H green stamps were popular. The stamps were distributed at supermarkets, gas stations, and department stores, collected by all the moms, and pasted into booklets. When you had amassed enough, the green stamps were redeemable for products featured in the S&H catalogue. Based on the number of folding chairs tucked away in the closet, my mother must have been collecting and redeeming stamps with a passion.
 
Once the table had the requisite number of boards in place, my father retrieved the table pads and lined them up; sandwiching the narrow ones in the middle, securing them between the wide ones with the rounded edges. Having anchored the table and chairs in place, my father wandered into the kitchen to ‘supervise.’ This meant bantering back and forth with Jessie who was the mastermind of Thanksgiving dinner preparation. Jessie padded across the kitchen floor, checking on the turkey in one oven, rotating pies and root vegetables in the other, adding a shake of Wondra flour to the pearl onions simmering in cream. My father liked to stir things on top of the stove, add a little extra salt to the matzoh stuffing, check on the status of the pigs-in-blankets we would nibble with cocktails before dinner.
 
My mother was busy in the dining room, poised before the doors of the breakfront, going through an imposing stack of perfectly ironed linen tablecloths and a dizzying stack of napkins. From my vantage point on the other side of the room, all of the table linens looked pretty much the same; assorted shades of white, ivory, palest yellow, or sage green embellished with intricate monograms and a sprinkling of French dots. Etched within the threads of the initials were the generations of people who had once circled the table. My mother knew the history of each cloth, recounting stories of birthday dinners, anniversary celebrations, countless Thanksgivings, all tethered to starched linens. Up to her neck in tablecloths and napkins of varying sizes, her commentary was muffled beneath the damasks and jacquards.
 
Expanded to capacity, the dining room table stretched into the living room. Often we needed my grandmother’s card table for additional seating, its green Naugahyde surface draped with the perfect cloth, echoing countless games of canasta and solitaire. Occasionally, there would be a need for a kid-sized Samsonite folding table, to accommodate the very youngest, but for the most part we sat elbow to elbow, youngsters and grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins. We lingered long after turkey and pies, exhausting the centerpiece of vibrant grapes and dried fruit, emptying the candy dishes filled with salted cashews and thin chocolate mints.
It was my favorite holiday, the one that echoed through the dining room the following morning as we dismantled the table and folding chairs, restoring the dining room to its original, everyday formation. The cranberry stained tablecloth and the napkins smudged with pumpkin and chocolate tumbled into the washing machine, facing a deluge of hot water and laundry detergent. My mother retrieved the clean linens promptly out of the dryer, whisking them away to her full-sized ironing board to restore their creases with her serious iron, before folding them and returning them to the breakfront.
 
Thanksgiving arrived a little early this year, with our group of eleven fitting  comfortably around a long table without boards, without monogrammed linens. As my sister and I earnestly ironed a contemporary tablecloth with stubborn wrinkles, it occurred to me that there was no need for a kids table. All of the kids have grown up.

​Attention Shoppers; both apple and honey cakes are no longer available in the holiday aisle. Personally, I’m not sad about it nor will I be dipping my toe into the gluten-free pumpkin-chocolate-chip quick bread waters. For the next 47 days, my focus will be on 9” aluminum pie plates and 11 oz. circles of pie dough. Not that I’m counting the days, or the pie shells, or the dwindling number of vacant shelves in the freezer adjacent to my workspace. It’s early in the pre-Thanksgiving game, affording plenty of time for critical thinking, strategizing and cautious yet fleeting optimism. In a few short weeks, just about the time toothy Jack o’ Lanterns lose their grin, my optimism will be replaced with complete and utter dread.
 
Right now, I’m looking away from American Thanksgiving and looking forward to this very Monday’s Canadian Thanksgiving. Combing through my well-worn expandable file of recipes, I’m fixated on everything pumpkin, cranberry, and apple. These are the recipes plucked from every Thanksgiving I’ve ever encountered as a professional baker. Each one is scribbled with notes, the excruciating details that analyze oven temperatures, baking times, parchment linings and foil tenting. Filed under “P” is a recipe for an embarrassingly large quantity of pecan bars, circa 1998. Baked in a full sheet pan outfitted with a pan extender, one recipe yielded enough nuttiness to feed a casual gathering of 96 guests. Scrawled in orange Sharpie marker across the top of the recipe are the words, “NEVER BAKE ON TOP RACK OF CONVECTION OVEN. EVER.” Navigating a sheet pan weighted down with pounds of nutmeats suspended in hot, sugar syrup is best attempted at eye level. These are the kitchen life lessons acquired over too many years and far too many oven burns.
 
I pause for a moment at a recipe for Poached Pears with Spicy Gingerbread, a cake baked in pans with deeply fluted sides and removable bottoms. Emblazoned across the top of the recipe is the not-so-gentle reminder to, “LINE PANS WITH PARCHMENT CIRCLES EXTENDING BEYOND THE PAN BOTTOM.” The memory of gingerbread batter seeping between pan bottom and sheet tray instantly conjures the fragrance of scorched molasses. The recipe for poached pears conjures a totally different fragrance memory. Set afloat in a saucepan of white wine, bobbing alongside cinnamon sticks, curls of orange peel, and speckled vanilla beans, the pears were both spicy and perfume-y.  Scribbled in the margin of the recipe is the reminder, “DON’T FORGET- PARCHMENT CIRCLE COVERING PEARS IS HOT.” I must have forgotten more than once.
 
In my ridiculously over-expanded, expandable file are a few recipes I’m considering for the weekend. On Saturday, the first round of strategic dessert planning will commence. We will gather in my sister’s Toronto kitchen, with good/bad pop music from the 80s blaring in the background. We will discuss and reminisce about recipes; restaurant recipes, Jessie recipes, recipes plucked from magazines and cookbooks, vacillating between what I want to make and what my sister suggests. We will talk about dessert in excruciating detail circling back around and around again. My sister is a brilliant strategist and planner, capable of making wise decisions. I am the problem, unable to truly decide the dessert story until I stand face to face with the produce at the St. Lawrence Market. My initial plans will undoubtedly change once again until my sister, the wise one, will stop the madness by saying, “Why do you ask for input when in the end, you will just make what you want to make?” Which is the very reason why an expandable, recipe file filled with inspiration is as critical to the holiday as a reliable pair of stretchy pants with an expandable waistband.

Timidly embracing the New Year 5780, I remind myself that resolutions are an ongoing process. Well over a year ago, my sister encouraged me to be ‘rigorous and ruthless.’ She suggested I comb through my closets and cabinets, consolidate my kitchenwares, organize the attic, burrow through the basement. My attempts have been woefully inadequate.  As a not so gentle reminder, a Danskin leotard in dark purple and a pair of Capezio ballet slippers stare down from high atop a shelf in the attic closet. I remember that leotard, one of many holdovers from far too many required dance classes. Reaching up to investigate, the leotard takes a nosedive off the shelf, landing at my feet. The nylon/cotton/quiana blend still has some stretch to it. With my sister’s voice resonating in my ears, I pause for just a moment before tossing the leotard in a trash bag. There’s plenty of room in the bag for a faded green Williams Sonoma apron and a pair of tired kitchen clogs. Baby steps.
 
Just this week, October slipped in through the kitchen door, forcing me to accept the cold, harsh truth of autumn. This was a challenge as the mercury hovered around 80 degrees on Wednesday, taking a dip into the 50s the next day. All of this dramatically impacts my little corner of the pie world. October may well be here, but she’s barely unzipped her L.L. Bean fleece and made herself comfortable. I hate to tell her, but somebody needs to remind October that she can’t add pumpkin spice to her latte in this kitchen.
 
I’m already tired of apples. Having exhausted the crates of Galas and Honeycrisp in last week’s holiday frenzy, I’m left with a few dozen plums begging for attention. They hint at fall but still resonate with summer, deeply violet on the outside, amber on the inside. Sliced in half, the plums twist and turn, exposing their stubborn pits. With screamingly tart skins and sweet flesh, the stone fruit requires sugar intervention. I sprinkle them a little too generously and toss in some almonds for good measure. Their purple skin is reminiscent of the leotard I recently tossed. Was I too hasty?
 
Sliced thin and fanned across a less-than-perfect circle of dough, the plums resemble a Busby Berkeley/Rockette geometrical dance formation. And five, and six, and seven-eight, the border of dough hugs the fruit, holding it in place. Brushing the pastry with egg wash, I jazz-hand some almonds across the edge of the galette and slide it into the freezer. Crossing the kitchen to turn up the convection oven to 375, I notice a line-up of loaf pans filled with pumpkin and chocolate chips. In the far corner of the kitchen, I hear October laughing. I look away.
  

Staring down six crates of Paula Reds, Galas, and Honeycrisp that have recently rolled into the bakery, I am feeling the slightest kinship with the woman in Cornelis Bisshop's oil painting, "Woman Peeling an Apple."​ Unlike the subject in Bisshop's painting who is peeling a single apple, my weekend features apple-ing on a much larger scale. 

When the sun dips into the sky this Sunday evening, Rosh Hashanah begins. The Jewish New Year is a time of celebration and reflection, culminating ten days later with Yom Kippur. Apples and honey are notable throughout the holiday, symbolic of a sweet New Year. 

Unlike the maidservant in Bisshop's painting, I am neither leaning casually against a door jamb while peeling, nor taking a pause from my apple madness.  Apple cakes on a singular level are a pleasant task. On a large scale, apple cakes are labor intensive and require expansive workspace.  Swimming against the tide of unwieldy tube pans, weighty cake batter, and pounds of cinnamon-sugared apples, there is nary a lifeguard in sight.  The cake is composed of four layers; batter, apples, batter, apples, tipping my new digital scale at nearly 3 pounds of batter and 2 pounds of apples, per cake. A crazy labor of cake love, it's excessive in the most celebratory of ways, 

In my apple cake reverie/purgatory, I cannot help but think back to last October, and my all-to brief visit to Amsterdam. Smack in the middle of the city's Museumplein (Museum Square), Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is the grande dame of art museums, boasting a staggering assemblage of iconic art and artifacts. Reflecting more than 800 years of Dutch and global history, the museum’s collection spans the Middle Ages to present day. Designed by renowned Dutch architect P.J.H. Cuypers, the Rijksmuseum is the largest museum in the Netherlands. Surrounded by expansive gardens and impressive sculptures, the museum boasts a dramatic history.

The museum weathered years of political unrest and war, yet remained intact until Germany’s invasion during World War II. In order to protect and save their most prized collection of Dutch masters, the paintings were removed from the frames, rolled up and secured in wooden tubes, then smuggled out of the museum through a trapdoor. The trapdoor was located in the room housing Rembrandt’s famous ‘Night Watch.’ The valuable artwork traveled through the trapdoor to a small door in the garden where it was transferred by boat to a secretive location in the south of the country.

The Rijksmuseum holds the distinction of being one of a small few in an occupied country during the Second World War that was able to save its major collection. Miraculously, only a few minor pieces were lost. When the museum re-opened its doors in 1945, the outpouring of visitors determined to see The Return of the Masters exceeded those who had visited the museum during the entire war. Today, the Rijksmuseum's Dutch neo-Renaissance building is home to more than 2000 paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. It deserves another visit, but not this weekend.

I can rhapsodize over Amsterdam's stunning art collection and perfect slices of Appeltaart, but the truth is my immediate focus is on American apple pies and Jewish apple cakes. We could however, all take a little lesson from the Dutch, whose iconic Appeltaart is an integral part of Dutch food culture. 
 
History traces the first Dutch apple pie all the way back to 1514. An early recipe for the dessert can be found in the Notabel Boecxken van Cakeryen, one of the oldest printed Dutch cookbooks. The recipe is more reflective of the famous Appeltaart, a deep-dish version combining thick apple slices with cookie crumbs, blanketed beneath a generous pastry crust. Often served with pouring cream or 'mit schlag,' (whipped cream) the Dutch embrace their traditional apple extravaganza throughout the day. It's quite common to see folks enjoying a slice with a cup of strong coffee for breakfast, or tucking into a wedge mid-day, or capping off a celebratory evening meal.  The Dutch approach to apples, and more specifically apple pie, proves that the  Dutch were truly Masters of this 'taart' form.