The Secret to Delicious Strawberry Pie

Last Updated on March 14, 2024 by Michelle

My daughter made my Grandma’s Strawberry Pie today. It was a long time in the making. But I’m so thankful we weren’t in any rush at all.

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The Secret to Amazing Strawberry Pie?

I think that may be the secret to perfect-every-time, made-from-scratch fresh strawberry pie… take it slowly. Something this good truly can’t be rushed…

We had just finished unloading the contents of the moving truck into our barn. Then she begged me to help her plant her dreams… dreams of her own vegetable gardens (I wrote here all about how she grows her amazing garden from seeds) and her own mini orchards.

It’s not easy, but it’s so important to help a child discover what they’re passionate about.

So the barn stayed full and the house stayed rather empty. We planted a terrace of blueberry bushes, a patch of strawberries, a plot of watermelon mounds, and a line of peach and plum trees. We worked elbow to elbow all week, accumulating dirt under our nails, deepening our passion for our land, and focusing on the promise of the harvest. I’ve itemized many of our favorite gardening products, if you’re interested.

Happy hands are never idle.

After rooting them in the rich soil she had prepared, she tended to her fruits (or the promise thereof) and watered them every day. Until we were blessed with days upon days of fresh, cool spring rains. Those days she could rest and watch the plants soak in their quenching drink from their maker, not their gardener.

Never one to keep her hands idle for long, as the rain danced on her gardens, she turned to her “crop” of strawberries we had purchased the day before.

Oh, the joy of making your first pie!

She was going to make her first-ever strawberry pie. She was going to make her first-ever from-scratch pie starting with her great grandma’s flaky pie crust recipe. Time in the kitchen, along with time in her garden and orchards, is an important passion to her. (Here I wrote about why I always try to encourage my children to fill today’s minutes well, to impact the hours of their future.)

She found the tattered recipe card in the small, wooden caddy on the counter. My friend–the one I have always called “best”– had presented the treasured roll-topped box to me before I married, using it to corral recipes she had collected from friends and family, near and far. Recipes that were now my daughter’s as well.

With her thick blond hair bobbing in the loose knot she had pulled it into on the top of her head, she started rolling out the dough. She stirred the cornstarch mixture over heat, and spoke about the distant future when she would be making a similar dessert with berries planted and tended to by her own hands.

She talked of fresh strawberry pie, so fresh that the berries were still warm from the sun.

Making a Fresh Strawberry Pie.

I just longed to enjoy the moment. Not rush ahead years into the future when we would be picking quarts full of berries in our own gardens–the fruits of her labors this spring. No, I didn’t even long to speed up the gelling process of my favorite pie. I just wanted to sit on my old wooden stool, in our farmhouse kitchen, on this dreary spring day, and watch my 13-year-old bear fruits beyond her age and across generations.

She was rolling the dough on the pie board her great grandmother had given her grandmother as a wedding present, using her great grandmother’s pie crust recipe that has withstood the test of time, and referring to the worn 3×5 card showcasing her Great Aunt Jeanette’s handwriting for “Easy Strawberry Pie.”

All this in our old farmhouse kitchen. A kitchen that had been the home of genuine, from-scratch food preparation for more than two centuries.

I savored the moment. The rain was gently pounding an irregular rhythm on the back window.

My daughter was rolling out a pie dough from my childhood memories.

Yes, this fresh strawberry pie had been a long time in the making. No need to rush it at all.

I’ve made a list of the tools I couldn’t do without in our farmhouse kitchen, if you’d like to know.

So, yeah, our old farmhouse has a wonderful old Rumford fireplace and bee hive oven, but it is also full of money-pit problems, so don’t let me romanticize it too much. If you wanna know some of the bitter truths (and joys) of owning an old farmhouse? I wrote about those here.

Grab a copy of my book, Sweet Maple, if you’d like to know more about simple living. (Or snag it on Amazon here: Sweet Maple.)

Wanna know where you can unearth some rustic farmhouse treasures of your own? You will LOVE this site I just discovered–Antique Farmhouse. I’m already addicted.

I’ve included a beautiful, handy printout of both my Aunt Jeanette’s Easy Strawberry Pie recipe AND my Grandma’s Perfect Pie Crust recipe in my resource library for my subscribers. It’s easy peasy to subscribe. (Seriously. It takes a whole 20 seconds. Maybe.) Just do so here, or type your email in the box at the very end of this post.

Oh, and if you’d like more ideas on what to make with fresh strawberries, I mean other than amazing strawberry pie filling, hop over to this post as well.

GREAT AUNT JEANETTE’S EASY STRAWBERRY PIE

1 cup boiling water

1 cup sugar

4 Tbsp cornstarch

pinch of salt

4 Tbsp strawberry jello (2/3 of a 3 oz box)

1 qt fresh strawberries (I measure out roughly 2 cups, after berries are cut)

Mix sugar, cornstarch, and salt. Slowly add boiling water to the dry mix and return to heat, mixing nonstop until it is almost clear and very thick. Remove from heat. Add jello. Let cool slightly. (We put it in the fridge for 10 minutes or so.) Add strawberries and let chill until almost set. Then put the filling in a baked, cooled pie shell. Cover and refrigerate until fully set. Top with whipped cream if desired.

Make sure you clean the berries BEFORE cutting off their tops, or water will pool inside the berries and keep the filling from setting correctly in the pie.

To pick yummy berries, keep in mind that your nose knows. A sweet fruity smell is more important than appearance if you’re looking for great flavor.

And fun strawberry fact: Did you known a strawberry is not really a true berry? Berries, after all, have their seeds inside. A strawberry, on the other hand, carries its 200 or more seeds around on the outside. The seeds are actually called “achenes,” and each one is officially a fruit. So when you eat one strawberry, you’re eating 100s of fruits! No wonder they’re so good!

GRANDMOM’S PERFECT PIE CRUST

2 cup flour

1 teaspoon salt

2/3 cup lard

4 tablespoons cold water

Combine flour and salt. Cut in lard until crumbly. Sprinkle with water and blend until mixture holds together. Shape into ball and let chill thoroughly in fridge before rolling out. Then, on lightly floured surface, roll to 1/8-inch thickness.

Lay in pie plate, trim and crimp the edge, and place holes all around the crust with a fork.

Bake empty shell for roughly 40 minutes at 365.

This makes two crusts, so for one strawberry pie, you will want to half this. I assume grandmom usually made a covered pie. Of course she probably quadrupled her double crust recipe, since she was baking for a family of 12. Pie for 12–now that’s a dessert that would be a long time in the making! But I’m sure grandmom’s pies, like Kayla’s, were well worth waiting for.

In fact, the wait makes the dessert all that sweeter.