Recipe Box - Peach Pie

The end of peach season is upon us, and I had not yet made a peach pie. Clearly I needed to do something about that!  ;-)  So yesterday evening, while Jeff was away at a meeting, I made a couple of peach pies and let them bake while I sat down with the kids to watch The Apple Dumpling Gang (a movie we had never watched, but which provided barrels of laughs for us).  :)  The house filled with the delicious smell of pie baking in the oven until finally the time was right and we got to cut big slices to eat while we finished watching the movie.  It was pretty much a perfect way to spend an evening.  :)

Making this pie is not complicated at all; in fact, it's just about as simple a pie as one could possibly make.  But this is the way my mother always made peach pie, so this is my favorite way, too.  :)

What You Need

Crust for 9" pie
4 large fresh peaches, slightly less than 3 c. sliced (or just fill pie shell with sliced peaches)
3/4 c. sugar
1/2 c. half & half (or less)
3 Tbsp. flour
1 Tbsp. butter


What You Do

Arrange peaches in unbaked 9" crust.  Mix sugar and flour, then add half & half to make a batter (the consistency should be like runny cake icing or pancake batter).  Pour batter over the peaches in the crust.
Dot the butter over the top.  Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 degrees for 35 minutes or longer.  Shielding the crust with foil will ensure it doesn't burn before the rest of the pie is done.  The filling will be runny when hot, then solidify as it gets cooler (but we never seem to have enough patience to wait until it sets up enough, so our first pieces of pie are always runny).  ;-)

When I was thinking about making this pie yesterday, I wondered if I had ever blogged about the recipe before; but a quick search of both this blog and my old one showed me that I had not.  I had, however, mentioned the pie before, and even shown a picture of my mother holding one that she had made and shared with us back in 2008.  Six years have flowed past since then, and my mother's Alzheimer's Disease has progressed so much in these six years that it's hard to even imagine that back in 2008, she was capable of making a pie!  I'm immensely grateful for this blog post that reminds me that it was so.

For me, much of the sweetness when I eat this pie comes not from the fruit itself or the added sugar, but from the memory of my mother making this pie so many times through the years.  I'll probably never make it (or eat it!) without thinking of her.