In 2016, Stacey Mei Yan Fong set out to make a pie for every state. The purpose was to create 50 distinct pies, every an ode to a selected place in addition to the individuals who dwell there. Seven years later, her ebook, 50 Pies, 50 States: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to america By Pie, is lastly right here. Pie is “a metaphor for all times in America,” says Fong, who immigrated from Hong Kong to Georgia in 2006. “The great thing about pie,” she says, “is that it’s a clean canvas. It may be savory; it may be candy.”
Born in Singapore and raised in Hong Kong, Fong’s early publicity was primarily to meat pie (each locations are former British colonies, she factors out). Candy pie, much less frequent to her, felt American, like what individuals in films ate at diners. When visa points pressured Fong to resolve whether or not to remain in america or return overseas, she selected to make the U.S. her residence, and her state pies mission started as a enjoyable distraction from the tedious means of making use of for everlasting residency. Not solely would she bake a pie impressed by every state, however she’d then give it to a good friend from that state. Fong explains the concept as: “What am I going to study this nation that I’ve chosen to name residence, by means of pie?”
Pie, particularly apple, has change into a singular culinary image of U.S. tradition. Fong’s cookbook and different current pie-related releases, like Cake Zine’s “Humble Pie” and Rossi Anastopoulo’s Candy Land of Liberty, reimagine not simply pie, but additionally the idea of america that it invokes. That sense of “Americanness” is itself a assemble, constructed out of generations of expectations, hopes, and norms. By pie, these releases think about how we think about and even idealize this nation, and the way else pie may converse to our multitude of experiences right here.
Fong’s ebook traces the life and group she’s constructed within the U.S. Accompanying every pie recipe are tales in regards to the related state and a dedication to an area good friend. Her edible United States includes strawberry mayhaw jelly pie with beignet toppers for Louisiana; blueberry and Moxie pie for Maine; and corn dog-hotdish pie with funnel cake topping for Minnesota. She contains classics, however for probably the most half, “these are my interpretations of the states,” Fong says. “It’s my journey and my exploration of what, like, West Virginia means to me.”
Her method to pie is forward-thinking: Alongside these distinctly North American creations are pie recipes impressed by her former houses in Singapore, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. Immigrant meals has all the time been a form of third-culture cooking, however codifying and embracing that mashup of cultures is particularly en vogue within the U.S. proper now. By comparability, Anastopoulo’s Candy Land of Liberty, launched in October of final yr, makes use of pie to look backward, unpacking the nation’s historical past by means of 11 pies, with apple first in her evaluation.
Apple pie, she explains, already had a foothold in England within the sixteenth century. So when settlers arrived on North American shores and located solely unhappy crabapples, they cultivated new apples to make use of as staple meals. Accordingly, the farming of apples was part of the colonial mission, she argues, introducing British customs and traditions, in addition to bolstering an unearned sense of possession over the land.
Within the early days, colonists tailored recipes from British cookbooks, lending apple pie a way of one thing borrowed, Anastopoulo writes. A turning level got here with Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery in 1796. Thought-about the primary cookbook written and revealed within the U.S., it redefined apple pie as American, and a logo of nationwide id was born. The precise recipe, Anastopoulo factors out, didn’t differ a lot from earlier variations. However that is the lore-building we do by means of meals: We use it to verify our sense of self and our place on the planet.
Even Cake Zine, the area of interest impartial publication that exemplifies the current pandemic-spurred cake renaissance, is placing cake apart in favor of pie: Its latest problem, set to ship in early August, is titled “Humble Pie.”
With the purpose of exploring society by means of sweets, founders Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush needed to deal with pie partly to deliver savory cooking into Cake Zine’s purview, but additionally to maneuver away from the opulence of cake. “Pie has been used to please and shock, and to humble and humiliate,” Bush says. Accordingly, the essays, brief tales, poetry, and recipes in “Humble Pie” poke at grief, disgrace, shortage, and even rejection and lust by means of the lens of Love Island.
As with Fong’s work, the nationwide symbolism of pie felt unavoidable. Pie evokes “issues which might be nostalgic, even for an earlier period of America,” says Abarbanel. Even when we don’t wish to dwell in these earlier eras, we’re drawn to the related concepts of coziness, grandmothers, and desserts cooling on window sills, she notes. “The Americana of pie is one thing that’s established in a approach that cake doesn’t actually have,” Abarbanel says.
In an article within the problem titled “American as Japanese Fruit Pie,” Elyse Inamine probes the uniquely American invention that’s the South’s beloved Japanese fruit pie. Discovering that it isn’t Japanese in any respect, Inamine presents the pie as a vestige of early-1900s Japonisme, named in a approach that allowed U.S. eaters to think about an exoticized, faraway Japan with out leaving the nation. It’s a pie that looks like the opposite however is definitely a projection of the self, Inamine concludes.
Regardless of its inherent nostalgia, pie is all the time evolving, a unbroken reflection of our altering nation. “Humble Pie” supplies a sequence of recipes for a brand new college of desperation pies, with an intro written by Anastopoulo. In it, Fong features a recipe for a Spam musubi pie. Spam sits on the border of overseas and home: It’s an American invention whose reputation internationally and inside immigrant communities within the U.S. is a direct results of the American navy presence overseas. Fong’s Spam musubi pie doesn’t appear like any pie I’ve ever seen on my vacation desk, but it surely’s simply as American as pecan and pumpkin.
Now that 50 Pies, 50 States is out, Fong is happy in regards to the conversations the cookbook will open up — significantly about how different individuals’s conceptions of a state’s pie may differ from her personal. “I’d like to know: What would you have got accomplished for that state?” she says.
If cake — a celebratory exaggeration of a dessert — embodies who we wish to be, these books present us how pie, in all its stripped-down humbleness, represents who we expect we’re.
