American Pie: Slices of Life (and Pie) from America's Back Roads
Author: Pascale Le Draoulec
Crossing class and color lines, and spanning the nation (Montana has its huckleberry, Pennsylvania its shoofly, and Mississippi its sweet potato), pie -- real, homemade pie -- has meaning for all of us. But in today's treadmill, take-out world -- our fast-food nation -- does pie still have a place?
As she traveled across the United States in an old Volvo named Betty, Pascale Le Draoulec discovered how merely mentioning homemade pie to strangers made faces soften, shoulders relax, and memories come wafting back. Rambling from town to town with Le Draoulec, you'll meet the famous, and sometimes infamous, pie makers who share their stories and recipes, and find out how a quest for pie can lead to something else entirely.
Chicago Tribune
[American Pie] will move pie enthusiasts to dust off their rolling pins and get busy.
Entertainment Weekly
A rich, satisfying account of one woman's cross-country search for the age-old dessert.
San Diego Union-Tribune
AMERICAN PIE is to be savored, slice by slice, chapter by chapter.
New Yorker
"You mean you just go up to complete strangers and talk to them about pie?" a friend's father asks Pascale Le Draoulec, the restaurant critic for the New York Daily News. Strangers not only talked to Le Draoulec, but they gave her enough material for a book. In American Pie, she visits antique stores, fish boils, and churches and discovers a staunch pie culture. Le Draoulec samples shoofly pie in Pennsylvania Dutch country and the elusive bumbleberry in Zion Canyon, and finds that even the most timid pie-makers guard their recipes aggressively. "Pie is the food of the heroic," a journalist in the Times wrote in 1902, after an Englishman suggested that Americans skip their daily slice. "No pie-eating people can ever be vanquished."
U.S. Army and Navy nurses at the Santo Tomás civilian prison camp in the Philippines during the Second World War would have agreed; after months of near-starvation, they were freed by American G.I.s armed with rations of "liberation" cherry pies. The story, and the recipe, are found in Barbara Haber's history of American cooks, From Hardtack to Home Fries , culled from cookbooks in Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library. Haber reminds us that familiar food and shared recipes made the kitchen range home for displaced émigrés, bringing Aunt Sylvia's soul food to Harlem, Sacher Torte to Harvard Square, and ice cream and oranges to dusty railroad depots along the Santa Fe trail. The collections of these recipes became a species of batter-spattered belles-lettres. In 1923, Joseph Conrad, in an introduction to his wife's cookbook, praised such literary undertakings as "above suspicion," for their object "can conceivably be no other than to increase the happiness of mankind."
Publishers Weekly
"Pie just may be the madonna-whore of the dessert world," Le Draoulec writes. She guesses it has something to do with "pie's dual nature; the fact that pie is both sensuous and maternal. Sweet yet sensible." A single career woman in her mid-30s, Le Draoulec has the same conflicted feelings about her ex-boyfriend and ticking biological clock that she does about homemade pie and its meaning in the modern world. As she crisscrosses the country in a Volvo named Betty Blue with IBRK4PIE plates, what seems at first like a carefree road trip in search of the perfect slice becomes much more than just a whimsical travelogue with great recipes. The author journeys along America's roads less traveled and finds that while many traditional bakers are disappearing, the power of homemade pie lives on. "Many people believe that the answers to life's bigger questions lie in the numeral pi," one pie-loving mathematician she meets postulates. "Perhaps it's also true of the kind you bake." Le Draoulec's conclusions about pie and its place in her life are, like a good slice of apple, sweet without being cloying and tart without being bitter. Of course, a book about pies wouldn't be complete without the recipes, and Le Draoulec offers such roadside pies as Libby Bollino's Turtle Pie from Abbeville, La. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
As satisfying as a slice of homemade pie, Le Draoulec's cross-country journeys in search of "the real stuff" are an armchair traveler's heaven. Le Draoulec was raised in Southern California by her French parents and American-style pie was not part of her culinary vocabulary. Her first quest began with a job opportunity in New York. In the company of a good friend, she chose to head eastward via the leisurely "pieways" of the United States. Beginning in Pescadero, CA, with a slice of Emma Duarte's Olallieberry Pie, Le Draoulec's first journey ended in Nyack, NY, with Deborah Tyler's Apple Plum Pie. It was several years later when the pie quest resumed in Ohio (bereft of memorable, homemade pie) and ended in Washington, DC after swinging West and South for such treats as Kathy's Apricot Cream Pie from the Pie-o-neer Cafe in Pie Town, NM, Libby Bollino's Turtle Pie in Abbeville, LA, and Lora Hansen's Rustic Huckleberry Peach Pie in Coram, MT. There are recipes for the best pies, photos of pie makers, and a plethora of pie puns in this delightful book. Journalist and restaurant critic for the New York Daily News, Le Draoulec is an enthusiastic tour guide with a quirky sense of humor and a personal life as unpredictable as piecrust. American Pie takes the reader into the heart and soul of a fading icon and inspires us to get out the rolling pin and take to the road. Highly recommended for all public libraries. Janet Ross, formerly with Sparks Branch Lib., NV Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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