Book Review: Sweety Pies

Here is a Cookbook review I did in the Chronicle for a cookbook with great pie recipes. You know, it is usual that I haven’t written about pies that much. I am THE PIE LADY. Probably because I have no wish to reveal all my recipes,  but after all I could just SHOW THE PICTURE, I don’t have to TELL YOU HOW I MADE IT!  A few of the recipes I make are from this book though!

Note the PROFESSIONALISM of my writing when I am doing it for COLD HARD CASH.

Sweety Pies

By Patty Pinner

The Taunton Press (2007) 171 Pages

There is nothing else on Earth like the pink glaze of a Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie clinging to the last shard of flaky, fluted crust, or the piles of breathtaking meringue crowning a tart Key Lime Pie.  A home baked pie is one of the things that actually make people happy, yet eating one is an experience that grows increasingly rare for most Americans. The art of pie-baking is in danger of being lost; how many times have you heard someone lament that they “just can’t make piecrust”?

In the small, Mayberry-like town of Saginaw Michigan, before the Second World War, pie baking was considered an essential womanly art: one of the many “strings to a woman’s bow”. The pillbox-hat-wearing, church-going, soul-food-cooking ladies of Patty Pinner’s childhood took their pie-making very seriously, and Ruth Pinner made sure that her daughter mastered the art. She passed along to her daughter not only her own skills and recipes, but also the best recipes of her friends and relations, which Ruth had diligently collected over the years.

In this captivating book, Patty Pinner remembers these mothers, aunts, neighbor-ladies and friends in colorful vignettes, and gives each woman’s premier pie recipe. Along with each recipe are truly inspiring photographs of each pie: no cookbook I have ever come across has managed to catalog so many varieties. Buttermilk Pie, Fresh Raspberry Pie, Peanut Butter Cream Pie, Rice Pie, Pumpkin-Coconut Pie, Tangerine Meringue Pie, and 64 other kinds, each one a particular woman’s tour de force.

The recipes are clear, simple, and easy to use. Pinner also gives her mother’s excellent, extraordinarily rich and flaky pie-crust recipe, as well as useful instructions on the shaping and decorating of pies. If your life suffers from inadequate amounts of home-baked pie, this book is the remedy.