Whilst reading, I encountered a passage which simultaneously made me think about reference frames (physics) and pie (yumm). Daniel (fictional) and Isaac Newton are riding in a carriage, recently swept out of a club where they were about to consume dinner. Daniel is understandably distracted by the presence of pies in the carriage, but Isaac seems to have forgotten them entirely.
"Isaac, though better equipped than Daniel or any other man alive to understand Relativity, shewed no interest in his pie--as if being in a state of movement with respect to the planet Earth rendered it somehow Not a Pie. But as far as Daniel was concerned, a pie in a moving frame of reference was no less a pie than one that was sitting still: position and velocity, to him, might be perfectly interesting physical properties, but they had no bearing on, no relationship to those properties that were essential to pie-ness. All that mattered to Daniel were the relationships between his, Daniel's, physical state and that of the pie. If Daniel and Pie were close together in both position and velocity, then pie-eating became a practical, and tempting, possibility. If Pie were far asunder from Daniel or moving at a large relative velocity--e.g., being hurled at his face--then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference. For the time being, however, these were purely Scholastical hypotheticals Pie was on his lap and very much a pie, no matter what Isaac might think of it."
As a result of reading this, I was obviously overcome with desire for pie. Daniel and Isaac are eating savory pies, which I could not make due to the fact that we had neither meat nor vegetable in the house. We were generally short on food, but I was able to rustle up some (year-old) frozen cranberries and apples (one partially eaten).
I don't have a recipe for the pie, because it was largely improvised. For crust, I used one of the pat-a-cake pie crusts from the Joy of Cooking. The rest was based on what I had for ingredients and a love of warm fall spices. This post has been languishing in limbo waiting for me to write one (I have confusing notes on what I did somewhere). I decided to just post it and hope that it inspires further pie-making. I recommend lots of brown sugar and cinnamon.
