Midwest Pie

May 1, 2023
Pies, both sweet and savory, pop up across the American continent, but nowhere as much as on Midwestern tables. Meredith Pangrace scoured sales and shops for old community cookbooks and even cast-off recipe card boxes. Here, she presents her findings, interpreting often terse directions to build this unpretentious little book that will summon up old memories for some and introduce others to an era when seasonality often dictated what sort of pie might show up on the dinner table. For fruit pies, apples, berries, cherries, persimmons, peaches, and plums all star in both fresh and dried fruit versions. Cream pies, with their rich and unctuous puddings, peak loftily with meringue and whipped cream. Flavors exotic to middle America, such as pineapple, banana, and lemon, thrill with their sometimes-pricey rarity. Depression and deprivation pies, such as chess pie and shoofly pie, show what inventive cooks could muster to treat their families when pantry shelves had turned bare. Just two savory pies make it into Pangrace's inventory: Nebraska's runza and Upper Michigan's pasty. Includes period photographs.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 15, 2023
Pangrace (Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen) culls 56 pies from family recipes and community cookbooks for a slim collection that works better as a historical archive than as guidance for home bakers. Recipes have been left largely intact on purpose; the sparse ingredients and brief instructions in many reflect their hardscrabble origins, from Amish farm life to the Great Depression. An informative introduction from Belt Publishing’s publicity director Phoebe Mogharei traces the rise of pie in the Midwest with waves of immigration and changing economic times. Chapters encompass “Desperation” pies, which include a recipe taken from a package of Ritz crackers; pies using local Midwestern ingredients, including black walnut and chokecherry; and “Retro Favorites,” including a “self-frosting” lemon pie. Pangrace’s brief and inconsistent intros provide origin stories for some recipes (“Shoofly Pie,” for example, was invented by the Pennsylvania Dutch), but others, like the intriguingly named “Millionaire Pie,” go unexplained. Most glaringly, the flavor descriptions are too sparse and vague to tell whether the pies are worth baking: vinegar pie is pronounced “surprisingly delicious”; the clove and cinnamon that spice a custard pie make it “unique”; and cottage cheese pie is a “specialty of grandmothers”—but should it be attempted? This has niche appeal, but not much to entice the average home baker.