How making Butterscotch Pie is like creating the life we want.
I was gifted my great-mother’s Butterscotch Pie recipe. It was on the original, decades-old index card written in old-school cursive that my modern eye could barely read.
Putting my apron on, I looked at the ingredients and had to Google “What is sweet milk.” Turns out it’s whole milk which is sweeter than sour milk and buttermilk - two other milk options back in the day. If interested, read more here.
But I digress.
I soon realized that the recipe was only for the butterscotch filling. After you make the butterscotch, you “fill a baked crust and cover with meringue.”
What kind of crust? How do you make meringue? Do I bake this pie? And if so, at what temperature? I had more questions than answers. Thankfully, there’s YouTube and an aunt I could call.
This pie making experience made me think about how when we start a business or pursue a new job or change things up in our life we want a “recipe” with all the steps telling us how to do it. We don’t want to get lost along the way.
The fact is there’s no recipe for any part of our life’s journey.
No one can replicate my great-grandmother’s pie recipe in the exact same way she made it despite any of our attempts. We know how to make the butterscotch, but we don’t know what crust she used or how she made her meringue. What we can do though is create our own version of her recipe.
We can’t build a business, pursue a career or create a life that looks like someone else’s because we aren’t them.
We can be inspired by them and know that because they did the thing that we want we can probably do it too, but we have to forge our own way. Remembering that when we’re not clear on what to do in the recipe of our lives, it’s not because there’s something wrong with us. It’s because we’ve never done what we’ve set out to do.
If it feels hard, it probably is hard.
It’s almost a gift when we don’t have a recipe card with the instructions laid out for us. It might feel like getting socks for your birthday, but if you’re open minded about this half-written recipe of life it’s easier to say, “Let’s see what happens when we do this.” There’s nothing to break. You get to call the shots. You get to experiment. You get to create something that’ll inspire someone else one day.
We’re all starting from mostly scratch, but isn’t that how the best baked goods are made?
Great Granny’s Butterscotch Pie Recipe (Exactly as Originally Written)
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon butter
2 egg yolks
2 Tablespoons flour
1 cup sweet milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
Boil first three ingredients until a very thick syrup. Mix other three ingredients and cook until thick. Remove from fire and add vanilla. Fill a baked crust and cover with meringue.
NOTE: The pie in the picture is my first butterscotch pie ever. I’m showing this picture because this is what first attempts look like. Nothing glamorous. A little embarrassing. Might even look like it was a waste of time and ingredients. But this is how we journey on in our lives. How we pursue our dreams. How we move forward. There’s got to be a willingness to head out and learn from the experience.