Thanksgiving: a time for pie

[The pie in the above photo actually has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, but I didn't have any photos of the more pertinent pies, so I settled for a glimpse of a delicious confection from Cafe Adelaide in New Orleans, from September.]

This year, C. and I drove to my parents' house for Thanksgiving, the first time we would spend that holiday together with my family. I hadn't been to the New Orleans area for Turkey Day since the year my brother got married (right after Christmas) and we had bridesmaid dress fittings and a shower and all that. Thanksgiving and Christmas are only a month apart, and I figured it was better to space out my trips since I always visited for Christmas.

However, last year C. and I decided to start spending Christmastime together, but by ourselves, discovering our own holiday and creating our own traditions. My family isn't very happy about this -- my sister accused me of "ruining Christmas" and my mom has tried luring me there without C. (he's Jewish and doesn't have a tradition of celebrating Christmas). So in the spirit of compromise and good feelings and family, C. and I decided we would visit my family at Thanksgiving instead.

We drove to New Orleans on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, leaving earlier than we would normally depart for a road trip because we had a very important mission: we needed to be in Katy (a suburb of Houston) at 11:00 am to pick up one of the most important aspects of a Thanksgiving dinner: pie.

We discovered The Pie Shoppe on our previous trip to New Orleans -- we were looking for places to stop and eat near Katy and the GPS pointed it out. We didn't have lunch there, but we bought a pie and ... damn. One of the great pie experiences of my life. So we absolutely had to get a pie there for Thanksgiving dinner. We ordered the pie in advance over the phone-- their pies are very popular. We picked chocolate cream, since my sister said she was already planning to make a pecan pie.

The Pie Shoppe is normally a cafe, but they close on the week before Thanksgiving and devote themselves to pies. When we walked into the shop on Tuesday, every available surface was covered with pies, mostly pecan. It was like the Land of Pies. Pieville. The Barbie Pie Dream House. Next to the cash register, I saw a spiral notebook with a waiting list of people who would pick up any unclaimed pies, who hadn't put in their order in time. Suzie, the owner and Empress of Pies, boxed up our freshly made chocolate cream pie, which we put in a big ice chest on the trunk of the car. The cream got a little messed up but that was all right.

We could hardly wait until Thursday for the pie. We had to satisfy our pie cravings with quiche Lorraine, which is pie-like, but not quite the same. We had to satisfy our sweet-tooth cravings with beignets and ice cream. (I took C. to Morning Call near Lakeside for the first time, and it looks exactly the same as it did back when we would pack ourselves in there late at night after proms and such. And exactly the same as it did when we were small and stopped there before or after a parade.)

Finally, Thanksgiving Day approached, and we took the pie to my sister's house over in Covington. It rode in my parents' car along with two turkeys, a giant container of cornbread dressing, homemade sourdough bread, rolls, and a lot of other stuff I can't remember. Oyster patty fixings, which I will have to talk about another time. By the time the pie reached my sister's kitchen counter, I had to smooth out the cream topping again, but who cares how the pie looked?

We had three pies after a giant Thanksgiving dinner: a pecan pie my sister made, the chocolate cream pie, and a mince pie that my mom decided at the eleventh hour she simply had to have. She bought a pre-made crust and a jar of mince filling and threw it together. I felt like I really ought to try the mince pie, since I have never had it before, and I do like apples and raisins and all that sort of thing.

But a little voice in my head pointed out that I had a limited amount of room left in me, even for pie. I ate a slice of the pecan pie, which was excellent. I had a slightly larger slice of the chocolate cream pie, which turned out to have stealth chocolate chips in it that made the pie experience even better than I could possibly have imagined. And then I looked at the mince pie -- and I had another, smaller piece of the chocolate pie instead. Our family completely wiped out that chocolate pie. I am sure the Pilgrims didn't have chocolate pie at the first Thanksgiving -- or else it might have been called Thankspiegiving -- but who cares?

My niece, who is eight years old now, loved the chocolate pie immensely. In fact, she went pie-crazy. She insisted that we call her Mr. Pie, and after dinner she ran around outside working off her big dinner and working the word "pie" into every single thing she said. Of course we encouraged her. We may have created a pie fiend. When you're a kid, at holiday dinners, pies are usually things like pecan and pumpkin mince and I can imagine those don't appeal to a younger crowd. We always had brownies or cake or something else at giant extended family holiday events, and rarely were interested in the grown-up pies. But if we'd had a chocolate pie, or even coconut cream, I'm sure it would have been quite different.

Posted at December 7, 2008 07:08 PM