Plum Raspberry Pie (for Breakfast)

Each Thursday, Emily Vikre (a.k.a. fiveandspice) will be sharing a new way to love breakfast -- because breakfast isn't just the most important meal of the day. It's also the most awesome.

Today: Ditch your go-to breakfast and bake yourself a pie instead.

In her fantastic book, An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler makes a passing reference to “the perfect solitary sybaritic breakfast of pasta eaten directly out of a cold bowl, in bewilderment and utter presence.”

How someone can so casually make such an evocative statement is beyond me, but I do know that feeling of bewilderment and utter presence. I don't get it from eating pasta for breakfast -- my pasta leftovers always find their way elsewhere -- but it is very much the feeling I get when eating leftover pie, cold, directly from the pie tin, armed with just a fork and no agenda. If others are awake, you may have to use a plate. And share. But if you are the first person to rise (which you should make a habit of being if there is pie to be had), then the solitary eating of leftover pie from the pie plate is your right, and your duty.

More: In case you want more pies to eat for breakfast, here are 9.

I don’t know how the love of leftover pie for breakfast became such a thing. But pie makes for spectacular leftovers, so perhaps pie for breakfast has always been a thing. Perhaps the Pilgrims first celebrated Thanksgiving so there would be leftover pie for breakfast. The Founding Fathers may, unbeknownst to the history books, have declared independence at the height of summer fruit season for lattice-topped reasons. Perhaps the circumference of a circle was first calculated in order to give us an excuse to dedicate a day in March to pi(e), thereby yielding leftovers. Perhaps, perhaps.

The thing about pie for breakfast is that it manages to feel both indulgent -- because it is -- and wholesome, in a sort of "in my mind I am a hardworking farmhand who shovels hay bales 12 hours a day and therefore has every right to eat butter and fruit for breakfast" way.

Nearly any pie is good for breakfast, but fruit pie is great. And if you are into lopsided reasoning, you can reason that a fruit pie is not so far off from toast with jam and lots and lots of butter. I put so much butter on my toast, I may as well be eating pie (under my stewardship and butter knife, an English muffin tastes suspiciously like a croissant).

More: Get Christina Tosi's English Muffin recipe, then turn them into croissants.

Leftover pie should not be an everyday breakfast, to be sure, but neither should fresh pie be an everyday dessert. And when you do have a leftover piece of pie to steal for breakfast, you may as well glory in it. I like to eat mine in the company of an egg or a small bowl of yogurt, just to flesh out my breakfast a bit.

More: Pick up this pie plate on our online shop, Provisions -- your breakfast deserves to be beautiful.

I have been reading the children’s rhyming book Each Peach Pear Plum a great deal lately, and it ends with, “Plum pie in the sun, I spy everyone!” Spying everyone happily picnicking with their plum pie made me want my own. I added a handful of raspberries because I had them, and the resulting pie is one of my favorites to date -- for breakfast or any other meal.

Plum Raspberry Pie

Makes one 9-inch pie

For the crust:

1 3⁄4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup (2 sticks) cold butter, cut into chunks
2 egg yolks
3 tablespoons cold milk

For the filling and egg wash:

1 recipe pie crust 
8 ripe plums, pitted and sliced into 1-inch thick slices (no need to peel)
1 cup raspberries
1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
Beaten egg, for an egg wash (I actually skipped the egg wash, but it makes the pie look nicer)

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.

Photos by Emily Vikre