I grew up in a home in which pie was spoken fluently. As a child, I assumed that pie appeared on everyone’s table, as it did year-round on mine. Looking back, I seem not so much to have traveled the circle of the sun as it inched through the seasons but around the rim of a pie tin: Lemon meringue to sour cherry, sour cherry to purple raspberry, purple raspberry to peach, then onward to apple and, finally, to holiday pumpkin and pecan.

It was only when I left home that I realized how unusual it was to have a mother and grandmother who tossed off perfect pies the way some people drop witty epigrams — and how borderline miraculous their pie crusts were.

or a lot of people, pie is all about the filling; the crust is an afterthought. Without the crust, though, you are eating a mousse, a custard or a compote — delicious all, but distinctly not pie. And if you are going to encase those excellent things in a flaccid flap of flavorless pastry, why not skip the extra calories and make only the good part?

So a pie worthy of the name must have a good crust — not just a vehicle for filling but a delight in itself. It marries tenderness with flakiness. It’s delicate, yet strong enough to keep the filling where it belongs. It’s nothing like the tough, desiccated things that most people mean when they say “pie crust.”

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