Honor Pi Day with homemade pie: It's a holiday everyone should be able to support

Blueberry-Orange Pi Pie.JPG
Celebrate Pi Day with a blueberry-orange pie, complete with the mathematical ration made out of crust. (Emily Jan/The Oregonian)
Special to The Oregonian By Special to The Oregonian
Follow on Twitter
on March 10, 2014 at 8:00 AM, updated March 10, 2014 at 8:45 AM


Last December, mathematician Shigeru Kondo announced that he had calculated pi to 12,100,000,000,050 digits. It's not even a beginning, of course, in calculating what stretches to infinity, but the feat gives us a clear and compelling reason to celebrate Pi Day this Friday, March 14.

The date is obvious -- 3/14. It's even better next year -- 3/14/15.

If you really need another holiday (and who among us does not?), Pi Day is pure and unsullied, unlike other observances. There's no squabbling over fuzzy history or personal religious beliefs, no tradition of drunken, unruly or even violent behavior in its celebration, no obligation to spend too much money or decorate the house. It's an observance of a concept no one in the whole world can dispute and that the whole world recognizes and shares. It's a holiday that could unite all nations and all peoples. And, most importantly, it's a good excuse to bake a pie.

Recipes included with this story: Blueberry-Orange Pi Pie; Blood Orange Custard Pie; Clam Pie.

Pi is, of course, a ratio, and even if it bedeviled us in seventh-grade math, we've all been told of its beautiful, mystical secret to the universe. It's not only infinite but eternal and ubiquitous. It existed before the universe came into being and will exist after it's gone. It's found in the moon and stars, the double helix of DNA, in music and art. So, you've got to admit that it's pretty wonderful. So is pie.

While the variations of pie aren't infinite, they can seem like that to anyone who thinks about it long and hard. Though the word "pie" immediately conjures up to most of us in the Pacific Northwest the image of a two-crusted fruit pie, either apple or berry, we're all familiar with a vast array of custard, chocolate, nut and ice cream dessert pies. Lately, there are some good (and weird) variations on these old standbys -- bacon in the apple pie, balsamic in the berry, jalapeno in the chocolate.

Besides dessert pies, there are all the main-dish, savory pies and quiches. And there are breakfast pies and appetizer pies and snack pies, so you can eat pies anytime, anywhere.  The Amish have a traditional funeral pie. If you start counting pizzas and calzones, the variations multiply still more. Cornish pasties and other international variations add still more. We haven't even decided yet whether we want to include cobblers, buckles and crumbles.

We can't say that pies are eternal, but their history goes back before recorded time. We know that Egyptian pharaohs as early as 9500 B.C. ate a kind of honey pie with a bread crust. The ancient Greeks ate meat pies and the Romans had both meat and sweet pies.  Medieval and Renaissance courts were notorious for their ridiculous pies with live birds, animals and dwarves popping out as later Playboy bunnies would from bachelor party cakes.

Fads in desserts come and go (there were crepes in the 1980s, cupcakes more recently and macarons currently), but pies seem to have held their own in American popularity for the past couple hundred years. Some flavors get lost only to emerge a generation later as a new discovery, lately inevitably heralded  as "comfort food." Sour-cream-raisin pie may be a case in point.

That is not to say that all is congenial in the pie-baking field. Food is not the irrefutable fact that mathematics is, alas. There are schisms among those advocating butter, lard or shortening crusts, those favoring thick or thin fillings, those loyal to cornstarch, flour or tapioca thickeners. People can get pretty huffy about these things.

But Pi Day is a good time to set our differences aside. Is there anyone, really, who doesn't like a good piece of pie? We can't advocate eating pie all day, even on Pi Day; we have to take some responsibility for our arteries, after all. But an indulgence of a slice or two is appropriate; it would be wrong to celebrate pi any other way.

-- Joan Harvey is a Portland freelance writer.