The Sunday Summons — April 19, 2026

On the week after the archive, a pie that needs to be made twice, and a perfect Sunday in the Coachella Valley

There’s a particular feeling that comes when you send something into the world that mattered to you.

Not relief exactly. More like the hush after a door closes. You stood in a room and said something true, and now the room is empty, and you’re standing in the hallway, wondering if anyone was listening.

I published the first post in the Vine series this week. 257 years of Southern California wine history, two great-grandfathers, a draft card, a valley buried under freeways. I’ve been researching and writing it for months, and now it exists outside of me, which is the strange thing about publishing. The work stops being yours the moment it goes out. It belongs to whoever reads it now. I hope it finds the people it’s meant for.

That’s the week that was. History. Archives. 1769. The weight of what got buried.

Now it’s Sunday.

Outside my window, the desert is doing its best April impression, which turns out to be extraordinary. Everything is green right now, genuinely, improbably green, the kind of green the Coachella Valley only manages for a few weeks before the summer heat arrives and reasserts itself. Blue skies. A good breeze. Seventy-five degrees and worth every one of them. Somewhere not far from here, tens of thousands of people are at a festival doing the thing festivals do — music and heat and the joy of being briefly somewhere that feels like nowhere else.

I’m at my desk with a cup of coffee — Archie’s on the couch.

It’s, genuinely, a perfect morning.

Yesterday I went to the kitchen to make Helen Carnes’s cream pie for the first time.

Helen was born in 1896. She cooked in a kitchen so small you couldn’t turn around in it. Her recipes live in a black book in fancy serif, passed down through my Aunt Kathy, and they are, I’ll be honest, often a question mark. They rarely come with clear directions, temperatures, or quantities that make obvious sense. Rarely with any of the reassurance a modern recipe provides.

This one has four lines — in my dream.

The pastry worked beautifully. The blueberry compote, California berries, a little sugar, no lemon, came out jammy, bright, and exactly right. The filling set the way it was supposed to: thick and creamy.

But the oven had other ideas.

It ran hot, the crust darkened more than I wanted, and I had to pull it out ten minutes early. The filling was still perfect underneath, but not fully cooked. The pie was a work in progress. Not the one I wanted to photograph and hand you on Wednesday. One more try, and we'll know for sure whether it's the oven or the recipe — or both.

I’m making it again.

This is the thing nobody tells you about cooking from old recipes. The first time is rarely the real time. The first time you’re learning the recipe. The second time, you’re actually making it and hoping it comes out right. Helen probably made this pie a hundred times without thinking. I’ve made it once. I have some catching up to do.

The second pie is coming this week. Fingers crossed the crust will be perfect like it was, because the pastry recipe worked. The blueberries will be sweet and saucy, as they were, because they were my recipe from years of making jams and sauces. The whipped cream will be dolloped on top with a pinch of nutmeg. And the cream pie's interior will be fully cooked and edible. The pie will be perfect. Or it won't be. Either way, I'll have learned something Helen already knew.

One week you’re in the archive, diving into threads that go back 257 years. Next, you’re standing at the counter with a question and a hot oven, making something Helen made without thinking, in a kitchen you can still picture, in a house that no longer exists.

The recipe is the archive. The kitchen is the excavation. And sometimes you have to make it twice. Especially when the recipe is 80 years old, and the person who wrote it isn't around to show you.

The Pulse: Making

The moment when the research ends, and your hands come alive. When history stops being something you read about and becomes something you do. It’s a different kind of learning, a different kind of knowledge. Slower. More forgiving. And considerably more likely to involve a pie that needs to be made again.

From the Ledger

The Hearth: Helen’s Old Fashioned Cream Pie with fresh California blueberries. Her recipe, my kitchen, one lesson already learned. Wednesday, April 22.

The Closing Bell

It’s a beautiful Sunday. The weather is the kind that makes you want to stay in it as long as possible, the kind the desert offers like a gift before it takes it back in June. Go be in it. Set something good on the table tonight. And if you have a recipe you've been meaning to try from someone who's no longer here to show you how — this might be the week. Even if you have to make it twice.

Join the ledger. Listen for the bell. I’ll see you at the table.

— Jen.