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I raised wonderful strawberries this year. A friend gave me a bag of freshly cut rhubarb.
Honey, who had never made strawberry-rhubarb anything, looked up a recipe and made a pan of strawberry-rhubarb crisp.
It was very pretty, with little interconnected islands of brown crust floating on a lake of dark-red filling. Honey gave me a first bite to test. It was good. Later I had a bowl with vanilla ice cream.
Tonight when I got ice cream out of the freezer, it was for my wife, not me.
"You're eating yours with milk," Honey observed, mildly surprised.
"With the good milk," I said.
The other day she came home from the Sparkle with a half-gallon of whole milk because for some reason it was 50 cents cheaper than two percent. We always use two percent milk, a compromise made long ago after she tried to force us into skim milk. Skim milk tastes like water.
I didn't know it was whole milk when I poured it over my Wheat Chex. (Yes, I am an old fogey who eats Wheat Chex. I don't think they'd still make it if it wasn't an essential ingredient of Chex Party Mix.)
"This cereal is really good," I commented.
"You're eating it with whole milk," Honey said.
My dad loved to eat pie (or cake, or 'most any dessert) in a bowl with milk.
I thought it was funny, a habit ingrained from being raised on a dairy farm. Grandfather Miller milked 18 head of Guernseys, big, gentle dairy cows that are fawn and white in coloration and give milk that is rich and flavorful.
I thought Father was foolish to choose milk over a scoop of vanilla ice cream or a dollop of whipped cream on his pie, something which I, being a kid, certainly would not and did not pass up, nor did I often pass up the ice cream in a long and otherwise uneventful life (marriage and offspring excluded of course.)
Somewhere along the line as a grown man, a confident man who is not afraid to try new things (or old things, in this case), I put my slice of pie in a bowl and poured milk over it. Perhaps we were out of ice cream. Perhaps I was thinking of my dad.
It was good.
It was better than good. It was right.
I found that milk doesn't fight the flavors of the pie; it compliments them. The flavors in ice cream compete. Whipped cream is a sweet nothing that instantly disappears in your mouth. Milk cuts the sugary sweetness of the pie filling, and provides a little fun at the end as you fish for that last cherry or bit of apple.
Spooning bites of Honey's dessert with milk, I tasted both the sweet of the strawberries and the tart of the rhubarb.
Englishmen like to eat cheese on their pie. The English potters from Stoke-on-Trent who immigrated to work the potteries of East Liverpool, Ohio, had a saying: "A slice of pie without the cheese is like a hug without the squeeze."
I've tried pie with a slice of cheddar and it's good. It's one among many odd combinations that make my tastebuds sing. I love aged white New York cheddar, but love it even more with a bite of beef jerky, or with sweet table grapes, or with bread and butter pickles.
In high school, our Key Club chapter took a trip to Charleston, W.Va., to view the workings of state government. On the way we stopped at a little country restaurant that had strawberry-rhubarb pie on the menu. Most of us boys had never heard of such a thing and we got tickled. Pity the poor waitress trying to take meal orders from a table full of teenage boys who couldn't stop giggling.
I don't remember anything from that trip about the workings of West Virginia government, but I'll never forget laughing uncontrollably over strawberry-rhubarb pie.
Honey's dessert doesn't make me laugh, but it does make me smile. Now, if only I can convince her that we should switch to whole milk.
And Dad, you were right. So right.
Fred Miller's third book of stories, "A Dead Carp on Shadyside Ave." is $10 and available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank's Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies, Connie's Kitchen restaurant, and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.