Easy As Pie

Nothing tastes quite as scrumptious as a homemade pie, one with flaky, melt-in-your-mouth pastry and filled to bursting with some sort of fruit or custard filling. Pie smells delectable, makes one’s mouth water just by looking at it, and usually a homemade pie, when placed on the dinner table, disappears in the blink of an eye.

I used to bake a lot of pie. I mixed the pastry, rolled it out, and fit it into an appropriate pie pan. I cut or sliced the fruit and added the necessary additional ingredients, or stirred up the custard or pudding filling and poured it into the crust, then either baked or chilled the pie as required.

It actually requires a lot of time and effort to produce a tasty, nice looking pie. The resulting messy counter top and assorted dishes require cleanup as well. When I consider that a pie vanishes in a fraction of the time it takes for people to consume a cake or other dessert, pies truly do consume a lot of time and energy.

So where does the phrase ‘easy as pie’ come from? My dad used to tell me that a certain task would be ‘easy as pie’. Of course this was during my youth, before I baked pies of my own, so the phrase never seemed incongruous to me until I started to produce my own homemade pies. Even then, as a young adult I loved baking pies so the entire process had not yet become a chore for me.

However, when my dad proclaimed that something would be ‘easy as pie’, even in my youth and ignorance I learned to suspect that the task required more than the small amount of energy that my dad insinuated it would take.

With age comes knowledge, experience, and the certainty that not many tasks, including baking a pie itself, will be ‘easy as pie’. Age for me brought increasing dissatisfaction with performing onerous chores, such as cleanup, and going to a lot of effort only to see the results of that effort disappear in a heartbeat. With the passage of time, the prospects of producing a pie in the near future have become totally unattractive. So again, I ask, where does the phrase easy as pie come from? Pies are anything BUT easy to make. Most tasks are anything BUT easy, and the older I get, the stiffer my fingers become and the less patience I have to fiddle around in the kitchen (or anywhere else) cleaning up endless spills and cleanups caused by the act of baking a pie or attempting to do another chore.

The thought occurs to me that if I twist the phrase and interpret it in a different light, and perhaps add a word to better define the meaning, then something CAN be as easy as pie. If by ‘easy as pie’ someone means that something is as easy as EATING pie, then I can agree wholeheartedly that a task may be simple. However, if someone means a task is as easy as making and baking a pie, then look out. The task will be anything BUT easy, and something that perhaps I don’t want to involve myself with. It also invariably means that the original task, such as baking a pie, inevitably leads to other tasks such as cleaning up the mess, washing the dishes needed to make and eat the pie itself, and the cleaning up of the empty pie plate.

Lawn mowing comes to mind when I consider how one chore inevitably leads to many many more. I love to mow lawn, but I dislike changing the oil, or removing the blades for sharpening. If I could just mow the lawn and that was the end of the job, I would have no problem with it. Same with baking a pie. If I only had to put it together and bake it, and an indentured servant would clean up the mess, cut the fruit, mix the pastry dough, and take care of the less pleasant aspects of producing a pie, I would make pie a lot more often.

Unfortunately indentured servants no longer exist so I guess I won’t make very many pies.

The next time someone tells you that a certain job will be easy as pie, maybe you ought to ask them to elaborate just a little bit more and explain what he or she means by that term.