Adrienne Kane - United States of Pie: Regional Favorites from East to West and North to South

For my father

After my husband, Brian, and I moved from Manhattan to New Haven, Connecticut, it seemed like I became instantly homesick. Not for New York City, though, but for Northern California, where I grew up. Moving from one place to another on the East Coast, rather than moving back West again, made our new address seem all the more permanent. This was where I lived now. But was New Haven home?

Homesickness manifests itself in funny ways. For me, I was drawn to the place that had always been a source of warmth, comfort, and a sense of accomplishment: the kitchen. But instead of cooking innovative modern food as per my usual habits, I pulled out the biceps-curling cast-iron Dutch oven that had been in my family for years. Potatoes were now my friends. I slathered whole chickens in butter and roasted them in a slow oven. I had never cooked this way before, but it was still deeply familiar to methis was the home cooking of my late grandmother and of her childhood on a South Dakota farm.

Such homey meals demanded a homey dessert, and for me, that meant pie. Pie solved two of my problems in one fell swoop: it kept my sweet tooth happy (theres nothing like sugar for homesickness), and it reminded me of my own culinary traditions. My grandma was one of those women who could whip up a pie with one hand tied behind her back, never using a measuring cup or a proper teaspoon. I cant even tell you when I ate my first slice of pieI just know that it was my grandmas.

Every year, come Thanksgiving morning, my grandma would pull up at our house, popping the pie trunk of her massive Crown Victoria as she slowed to a stop in the driveway. Pie after pie sat in Grandmas trunk, nestled between kitchen towels and aprons that rendered the stacks impervious to the rocking of the vehicle. There would be blueberry, sweet and staining, and strawberry-rhubarb with rivulets of juice creeping out over the crust, both made with fruit my grandma froze at the peak of the season. Classic apple pie sat next to rich pumpkin, its custard cracked during baking from the heat of the oven. We carried the pies to the laundry roomthe only place with room to house these numerous dessertsand covered them with cotton dish towels. Throughout Thanksgiving dinner, my appetite wandered to what waited for me at the end of the meal. The turkey was just a precursor to the main event.

With one womans stellar baking skills so readily at hand, there was little need for me to learn how to bake a pie myself. My grandma was generous with her sugarif I hankered for a pie, I had only to ask. And many times I kept her company as she made her famous pies. I watched her cut fats into flour; I watched her peel and slice apples with the same dull paring knife; I watched her crimp her crusts and vent her pies. But for all that, until I moved to Connecticut, I had never baked a pie of my own. My entrance into pie making wasnt totally smooth. My crusts were patchy, my fluting uneven. Meringues wept and custards refused to set. But, just like speaking a foreign language, the more I practiced, the better I got.

Making a new home is as much about becoming acquainted with your new environment as it is about getting settled. So, those first months in Connecticut, when I wasnt braising a pot roast or rolling out rounds of dough, I found myself wandering the stacks of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. We had moved to New Haven because Brian had been offered a teaching job at Yale. Although I wasnt a student, his job meant that I had access to the libraries, and the only other activity that distracted me from my homesickness as much as baking was reading. At first I just wandered the stacks, thumbing the spines of dusty books. The stacks reminded me of a morgue, or at least how I imagined a morgue would look and feel: the ceiling was low, the lights flickered, and there was an ever-present chill. One day, Brian suggested that I take a look at the librarys cookbook holdings. It had never occurred to me that a university library would even have a cookbook collection, there among the treatises on philosophy and critical theory.

I didnt waste any time. The next day, I headed straight for the stacks that housed the cookbooks, excited to check out some big, inspiring books full of lush photography and tantalizing recipes. But the cookbooks lining the shelves looked nothing like that. Instead of the glossy doorstoppers filled with color-saturated photographs that I was used to, few of these cook-books even had dust jackets. Their spines were worn; some were even spiral-bound. Their pages were yellowed and softened.

I pulled a stack of books at random from the shelves. I dropped my satchel on the floor and sat down beside it, leaning my back against a bare wall. That first day I read for hours, completely lost in the cookbooks. There were books written by farmwives for farmwives, housekeeping guides, cooking manuals for newlywed brides, books produced by church groups and ladies auxiliaries. Many of them had not been checked out in years, decades evenif ever. They were so much more than collections of recipes; each one was a little window into a world now gone, a historical record. By reading Mrs. Porters New Southern Cookery Book from 1871, I learned how she culled a chicken and how she boiled the lightest, most tender dumplings. I was able to catch a glimpse of what her everyday life entailed.

Although many of the books were more than a century old, they somehow still seemed so modern. The recipes were based on local, seasonal ingredients. Many of the books contained chapters on canning and preserving. Nose to tail dishes were common. These werent fashionable books, though. They were sensible, aimed at women whousually by necessityvalued economizing, women who avoided waste, who had to make do with the ingredients available where they lived. And the result, almost as though by accident, was nourishing, soul-satisfying food. They showed that our culinary past was not about convenience food or TV dinners. It was about simmering, sauting, and baking real food for family and friends.

I checked out a few of the books that struck me as most interesting and headed home, eager to spend some quality kitchen time with the pie recipes in particular. The recipes proved to be more challenging than I expected; I was used to modern cookbooks that were specific in every detail. Reading these recipes was more like cooking alongside an experienced grandmother. There was no mention of teaspoon measurements for spices, no oven temperatures indicated, no cooking times given, no fuss.

While the recipes intrigued methe Avocado Pie from California certainly sounded delicious, if a little unfamiliar, and just reading about the Peanut Pie from Virginia or the Burnt Sugar Meringue Pie from Kansas was enough to make my stomach rumbleI could see how they would be mystifying and at times intimidating to cooks today. We have become accustomed to recipes with lists of ingredients, concise instructions, timetables, and, most certainly, suggested oven temperatures! It was no wonder so many of these cookbooks had not been checked out of the library in years. The recipes could use some updating, a bit of culinary excavation. A little less sugar, lighter spicing, more fruit, and these pies could enjoy a resurgence; they could truly become heirlooms of our culinary past to be celebrated. My experimentation began, many sacks of flour were bought, pounds of sugar were gone through, and the