As Easy as (Rhubarb) Pie
By: Fsi Student Programs
Tags: Fsi Students, Stanford, Internships

About the author: Sean Gallagher ’21 is an FSI Global Policy Intern with the World Justice Project. He is currently an International Relations major at Stanford University.

Whoever came up with the aphorism “as easy as pie” can only be described as one of the biggest liars in history. Before this summer, I was blissfully ignorant: I happily ate large quantities of pie (I can’t imagine a better emotion than eating pie, to be honest) but the experience of making one myself was a… learning experience. You see, one day, I was gifted with a bunch of rhubarb. Having started cooking, I thought that it would be a good time to attempt making pie.

Big mistake.

The pie itself turned out to be delicious; the process, though, was rather filled with panic. Nearly every pie recipe that I could find for the crust stressed that the butter had to be kept COLD or else you would be sent to bakers’ hell, or something equally terrible. If I remember Professor Covert’s explanation from the cooking class at the BOSP program in Paris correctly, it has to do with butter being an emulsion that, if heated, will break, turning the crust into a soggy mess instead of being light and flaky. I wasn’t about to take half measures with this pie, so I put everything in the fridge to be as cold as possible; I even got out ice packs and chilled my hands to try to avoid my body heat melting the butter.

You might be wondering at this point — shouldn’t he be writing about his experiences at the World Justice Project, and how there seem to be a million different crises related to the rule of law at home and abroad right now? Yes, he should. But pie is more delicious. And significantly less existential crisis-inducing.

But at the very least, working on the rule of law index is something like baking a pie. Is this analogy a stretch? Yes. But go along with it. Since my last post, I’ve been on three main projects: mapping the questions in the World Justice Project’s expert survey to their variables for the calculation of the index, working on a COVID tracker for the WJP, and most recently I’ve been working on compiling the dates of upcoming elections around the world, with details about the elections. Building the COVID tracker was a lot of fun — I got to code a little bit in Python to access data from Oxford and the WHO, and it was a fantastic experience, to be able to look at something and say that I built it. Rather like… baking a pie? But the thing that has stuck with me is that each step of the creation of the index influences the final product — if it is done halfway, then the final results will be biased and inaccurate.

This brings me back to the pie. After I froze my hands off, I worked the butter into the flour, made the dough, and refrigerated it — I left it too dry the first time, but luckily the world didn’t end when I added enough water to make it a cohesive dough.

After shaping the crust into something that resembled a circle (and failing and re-rolling the dough probably too many times) and dumping in the filling, I threw the pie in the oven with a prayer. Luckily, though, it turned out to be edible.

Pie baking, like the internship, taught me how important it is to be careful with the little things. But also — baking bread is far less stress inducing. If you feel like baking, just buy pie and bake bread. This is where the analogy ends: there’s no metaphor about baking bread instead. It’s just delicious. So if you haven’t jumped on that particular quarantine bandwagon yet, I strongly encourage it.