An original locavore

Grandma Doll's rhubarb pie

Yesterday I made my grandmother’s rhubarb pie. Grandma Doll was a shy woman, well-known in our small Western Kansas community for her cooking and baking. Like many shy people, she was possessed of a steely will and uncompromising standards. When she baked, the eggs had to be days from the hen, the butter had to be fresh, the rhubarb from her garden patch. Bigger projects, like her chicken and noodles, called for more drastic measures such as fattening the chickens from her parents’ farm in a pen in the yard, butchering them, plucking them (I got to help with that) and making the noodles by hand. Nothing was too much trouble, but the point was freshness, not gourmet cooking (not that she would have known what that was).

So when I wanted to bring a pie to friends’ house for dinner, I found the little card entitled “From the kitchen of Dora Doll.”  The pie starts with eggs whipped with sugar which lightens the rhubarb and cuts its tartness. And a lattice top makes the pie pretty. And as I read to the end of the recipe, I realized that Grandma had carefully noted the recipe’s origin. She had adapted it from Mrs. W.H. Webb of Lyons, Kan., whose recipe had run in a local paper.

Much of today’s world would baffle my grandmother, who died in the late 1980s. But the new appreciation for eating locally and knowing the source of ingredients would have seemed no more than common sense to Grandma, a locavore before her time.