A Story of Drama, Fierce Competition, Mom and Apple Pie

It is a culinary version of sudden death: two pies are tied for first place in Yankee Magazine's Great New England Inns Apple Pie Contest. Thirty partly eaten pies from six states fill several tables next to Boston's Faneuil Hall. The six judges, most of them editors associated with the magazine, look sober as if they don't want to appear to be enjoying themselves too much.

Standing nervously nearby is Chris Lasell, the 23-year-old pastry chef of the Hanover Inn. His pie has already been declared the New Hampshire champion, and it is now going crust to crust with the top entry from Maine.

This is not easy pie; Lasell spent a week and a half preparing for the contest, and he has brought to bear skills he learned from two years of study at the New England Culinary Institute, from two more years' experience at Dartmouth College's hotel, and, most of all, from his mother. "When I'm aiming at making the best apple pie," he says, "I always think of what my mother used, to make."

Back home in Springfield, Vermont, the elder Lasell taught her son the country ways of baking. For example, she was not the sort to use Crisco, that Lite Beer of shortenings. A pie would start the way pies had begun for centuries: with a pig. She would buy the animal and have it slaughtered, and then strain the fat for the lard. "Lard is good," explains Lasell, whose youthful frame allows him to praise animal fat. "It's solid at room temperature but liquid at body temperature, so the moment you put it in your mouth it melts. Crisco has a higher melting point and virtually no flavor."

The young baker has used his combination of formal training and apron-string know-how to take on some of the most difficult of baking feats. Upon coming to the Hanover Inn in the winter of 1986, he made a delicate pastry rendering of Baker Library. And when Yankee Magazine invited the Inn to participate in the pie contest as part of a Great New England Cook-Off and Food Festival, Lasell got right to work.

Days before the contest, he began mixing flours to get the perfect crust. (He does not sneer at those who use all-purpose flour, however.) And he experimented with the filling. At the Inn, he uses a variety of apples for baking, depending on what is available: Cortlands, Macintoshes, Rhode Island Greenings. But his mother used Cortlands, and that is what Lasell chose for his pastry masterpiece. "The Cortland is firm, it's tart, it has a high acidity level, but it's not so sour that it's painful to eat," he says.

"When it's baked there's still some texture to the apples. They haven't turned to apple sauce."

His mother was not the only advantage that Lasell had over his competition. The inn's executive chef, Michael Gray, had come to Hanover from the Bostonian Hotel across from Faneuil Hall. He arranged for Lasell to use the hotel's bake shop so that the pie could be rushed fresh to the contest. Actually, it ended up fresher than he expected. After assembling his pie and finishing off the crust with a few cuts in the shape of a pine tree (appropriate for Dartmouth's baker but actually learned from his mother), he put his masterwork into the oven and then realized an hour later that it was still cold. He turned the heat on, waited anxiously, and then rushed his still warm pie across the street.

The competition, baked by about 30 country inns from the six New England states, was daunting. For the next hour, the judges selected a winner from each state. They reflectively bit into elegant pies with gently arched, egg-glazed crusts; pies embossed with floral patterns or covered with intricate lattices; pies whose fillings featured rare apples.

The winners remarkably reflected the characters of their home states. The Rhode Island pie had a high lattice crust. The top of the Vermont winner was embossed with a floral pattern. The Massachusetts pie defied tradition with a flat, circular tart and a filigree crust. Next to these, the champions from those two down-to- earth states of Maine and New Hampshire looked rather plain. But in New England this is often considered a virtue, and the judges ranked the two pies above the rest. One of them was Lasell's.

The tasters now have the enviable task of trying the pies again. They are asked what determines a winner. "A good apple," replies Edie Clark, a senior editor at Yankee. "No hunkies," asserts Tim Clark, the magazine's executive editor. "That's what I call things like orange rind and cranberry bits and things that don't belong in an apple pie."

But both pies have "a good apple," and neither have hunkies, and it is only after an agonizingly long spate of thoughtful mastication that the judges declare the winner of the Great New England Inns Apple Pie Contest: the New Hampshire entry, represented by the Hanover Inn.

And Dartmouth thus lays claim to yet another superlative, thanks to training and diligence, Cordand apples, and Chris Lasell's mother.

Rebecca Bailey, writer for the Valley News, contributed to this story.