Making a Pie with Maria Part I: Mixing the Dough

Maria called out the ingredients for
me to write down as she put them
into the food processor.
Her back was to me, her voice muffled;
I leaned over to see her peering into
the food processor, adding flour from what appeared
to be one of those “multiple of one-third” measuring
cups no one ever uses.
She crisply called out “two cups”.
Puzzled, I returned to the table and
dutifully wrote down two cups Hungarian
unbleached high altitude flour.
One half teaspoon salt was the next
ingredient she called out. Again, I
peaked around her to see that she had
poured salt into the palm of her hand;
we made her pour the salt into a measuring spoon
to prove her skill at measurement;
it was annoyingly accurate.
Eleven tablespoons of butter was easy
with the paper wrapper on the sticks that
we could all see.
The steel blades of the food processor
blended the flour, salt and butter together
until Maria pronounced the mix “just right”
by the “sound of it”, and only then slowly
poured in exactly ¼ cup of chilled water
she pulled from the freezer.
If we had any doubts about the imperfection
of Maria’s methods, they were quickly dispelled
as the crumbly mixture transformed into a
a perfect twirling cylinder of pie dough.