Emily Elsen - The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book Uncommon Recipes from the Celebrated Brooklyn Pie Shop

As siblings, we are very close in age, which makes us practically peers. Growing up in a small midwestern town where we graduated high school with the same fifteen kids we went to elementary school with, we managed to keep a firm sense of independence and to pursue our own interests and friendships (thanks in a large part to a strong mother intent on raising us and our brother, Chris, as self-determined people). Though we shared a bedroom, teachers, basketball coaches, and after-school activities during our school years, we followed very different paths after high schoolEmily to New York City and London for art school, and Melissa, after finishing a degree in finance, on an extended work visa journey through Australia and New Zealandbefore reconnecting to live together again in an old house in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where we would eventually discover a mutual love for pie baking and turn it into our livelihood.

The Calico Kitchen, on Main Street in Hecla, South Dakota (population 230), was our second home as kids; our playground for creativity; our venue for weekend breakfasts, high school lunch breaks, and after-school hangouts; the site of our first job (dishwasher), second job (waitress), and third job (cook); and the backbone of our family life. Founded, owned, and operated by our mother and her sisters, Susan and Anne, the restaurant absolutely defined a community gathering placeserving lunch to the regions farmers, banquets to the local bowling team, meals to the wild game hunters who traveled from afar for the abundant local pheasant- and deer-hunting seasons, coffee to the after-church crowd, and annual prom banquets to the high school students.

Over the years we held family gatherings thereespecially when all our aunts, uncles, and cousins made it back to town for a holidayand the restaurant would be filled to capacity with just family. Mothers Day was one of the biggest days of the year at the Calico and was always a special time to be working together in the kitchen with Mom and our aunts, serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner to our close-knit community of mothers and their families. Every day, it was the norm to be surrounded by hardworking women in white aprons simultaneously handling the grill, the oven, or the fryer; washing the dishes; prepping the potatoes; carving the meat; and, yes, baking the pies. And there was one special woman who baked all those ever-popular pies, our grandmother Liz.

Elizabeth Zastrow was born and raised in our little town of Hecla in the house her parents built. After helping raise her brothers and sisters, she moved to Chicago to work as a nanny, but eventually returned home to care for her mother. She met our grandfather Frank when he came to town with his passel of hunting dogs looking for a place to board; he rented a room in the ample upstairs, which Grandma and her mother maintained as a sort of local inn. Grandma Liz always joked that at thirty years old she was an old maid and never expected to marry. But Frank took a liking to Liz and won her heart and hand in marriage, and within ten years they had seven children, who were also raised in that very same house.

We love to tell the story that our parents, Mary and Ron, met while working for Frohlings Jack & Jill, the local butcher, and its true; our dad broke down animals and cut the meat, and our mom worked the counter, weighing and wrapping it to order for customers. It should come as little surprise that they would both venture in their early twenties into food-related businesses in their hometownour mother with her restaurant and our father with his own grain-farming operation, which he started with the help of his mother, Frances, and father, Marvinboth with a true passion and dedication to making their enterprises succeed. It was our father who instilled in us that working for yourself is the only way to go; make your own raises, he would advise.