How to Make a Pie: An Illustrated Step-By-Step Guide to Perfect Crusts and Fillings

I grew up eating pies. My mother is a cracker-jack pie baker and the crust you can bake from this book beats hers hands down! My sisters both bake pies, too, so the competition is stiff at holiday time. I baked a Tar Heel Pie using the crust recipe from this wonderful book for Mother's Day and my sisters threw out Mama's recipe and asked for mine. It's good stuff. I want to try the chocolate pie recipe. The vanilla custard is drop dead good and the apple is a blue ribbon winner. Great book.

I was skeptical that this book was going to produce better pies than the ones I make out of How To Cook Everything or Williams Sonoma's Pies and Tarts but it does. From a thorough but brief discussion of why you use the ratio of fat to flour suggested and why you really use both butter and vegetable shortening (they melt at different temperatures so there is separation in the crust at more then one point in the baking, which makes the crust flakier), to discussions of the best types of apples to use for apple pie, and which spice combinations tested best. These are instructions from people who tested pies every way you can think of, and found out what worked best for each part, offered up with explanations of why it works best.This is a concise, short book, and the best primer on pies you could ever have. It's going to make all my pie-making better, even when I dig back into the big books. People noticed an improvement from my already great pies with the first one I baked out of this small collection. Worth every penny.

Use this book and you will make wonderful pies! Our family loves the apple pie and the chocolate cream and the banana cream. But the best thing is the crust recipe. You'll get a reputation for really knowing how to make pies! This is a succinct little book at a minimal price. My only surprise is that they did not use Clearjel as a thickener. It's Great!

By following the directions in this book, I made my first successful pie after numerous semi-failures. Not only is the book thorough, it tells which ingredients work best (i.e. a combination of butter and shortening for a tender and tasty crust), and why one method is better than another. The pie recipes include a number of types. I want to try them all.