Black bottom oatmeal pie

"Women judge a pie by its crust, men by its filling."

Sue Hubbell/The New Yorker

To be honest I'm on the verge of abandoning this post, as, at the moment, I feel there is not much to say. But oats - I wrote about oat cakes recently - and the rather delectable photograph keep me going. Also because it's so American and America is very much in front of our face at the moment is it not? And what's the thing about pie - American pie that is? I mean they are talking about tarts when they say pie. Well - mostly.

So I will start at the beginning of this, probably not very satisfactory, exercise - with Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen's recipe for Black bottom oatmeal pie - 'Adapted, just a tiny bit' says Deb, from Four and Twenty Blackbirds - a bakery in Brooklyn run by two sisters, Emily and Melissa Elsen. It is after all the thing I picked out in my Ideas list. As you can see from the photograph below, the shop looks pretty humble, but don't let that fool you - their Black bottom oatmeal pie costs US$45 - which on today's dreadful exchange rate is a whopping AU$72.12. Which is a huge amount of money to pay for what began - so it seems as a 'poor man's pecan pie'. So this is obviously not a poor district of New York.

At least they published a recipe in their cookbook and other websites have published it too, so you can make your own - for example - Black bottom caramel oatmeal pie - e2 Bakes Brooklyn - and to be honest I wonder whether this is actually from the two sisters - or one of them, seeing as how their surname begins with an E and the christian name of one does too.

I tried very hard to find radical variation of this particular 'pie' but the best I came up with were these two - the first being Chocolate molasses oatmeal pie from the Bunsen Burner Bakery, which I just had to include because the writer of this blog is a scientist, and because of yesterday's post on chemistry in the kitchen. Her recipe could be difficult for us in Australia however, as it contained three types of molasses. My other example is from Edd Kimber on the Olive Magazine site who adds spices to his mix for Spiced chocolate oatmeal pie

A step back - to Oatmeal pie. For this is what the forerunner of the black bottom version which includes chocolate, is. The internet doesn't seem to be sure whether this is a Civil War recipe or an Amish one, but whether it's one or the other the motivation is the same - the expense of pecans for Pecan pie. So the frugal and enterprising cooks of the day substituted oatmeal for pecans with apparently a very similar tasting result. So here we have, as examples: Classic Amish Oatmeal pie - 12 Tomatoes or Grandma's oatmeal pie from The Country Cook. Not quite as humble as the British who just went for breadcrumbs to make Treacle tart - yes tart because that's what this is - but almost.

I will now take another step back to another variation on the black bottom version - although this one involved chocolate chips - Oatmeal chocolate chip cookie pie from The View From Great Island. I found it because of the chocolate, but noted that in the introduction to the recipe the author declared that it was inspired by the original Toll house cookie pie - and her version included walnuts - not pecans - to which I shall come.

Now in my ignorance I pictured an actual toll house - I imagined there were toll roads with toll booths which may have been associated with shops or street sellers, selling cookies. But no - actually Toll House cookies are apparently a Neste product - a particular kind of chocolate chip cookie, and this is what we are looking at here - towit 2 examples below: Original toll house pie - A Bountiful Kitchen and Oatmeal chocolate chip pie - Allrecipes. Neither of which looked particularly tempting I have to say.

But pecans. Pecan pie is traditionally served at festivals like Thanksgiving and Christmas I think but also anytime. This Classic pecan pie is from Lauren Weissenthal/Serious Eats. It seems to have appeared in recipe books in the later 19th century and is generally associated with the south. The filling is nuts, eggs, sugar - mostly corn syrup these days, although the bad reputation of corn syrup is making cooks turn to various other options. It's one of those traditional dishes that people get all hot under the collar about. In spite of my mostly seeing alcholol and chocolate included in the mix in very many recipes that populate the net, I also found this:

"There is no need for chocolate or bourbon in pecan pie. If your pie is too achingly sweet (it can indeed happen!), use less brown sugar or add more salt or butter or pecans to adjust. Work within the basic framework. Do not add chocolate or bourbon to a pecan pie, nor tuna fish or kimchi." Dave Bry/The Guardian

And he said a whole lot more along the same lines - as did others.

Nevertheless notable cooks such as David Lebovitz whose Chocolate pecan pie is shown here continue to add chocolate and rum or bourbon.

And finally that pie thing. I mean these are not pies are they? They are tarts. The word tart comes from the Latin torta panis meaning a round loaf of bread, which later became a tart or a cake. Pie is not so clear:

"it was probably those bits of meat that gave us our distinctive English word pie, from the last syllable of magpie, the bird famous for stealing bits and pieces of things to construct its nest." Ina Lipkovitz/Psychology Today

I was actually quite surprised to find that pie - even in English, can refer to what we mostly think of as a tart and vice versa. The nearest I could get to the American reasoning on pie and tart was that a tart was fancy and a pie was homely. And pie refers to pastry on the bottom or pastry on top and bottom. Which surely would be confusing. Somebody also seemed to think that the English didn't have savoury tarts, which is just not true. So I'm sticking to a tart doesn't have a top and a pie does. Apple pie and apple tart are two different things.

Well I managed to ramble, which just goes to show that if you start writing then you can waffle for quite some time.

YEARS GONE BY

April 4

2024 - Authenticity - a book and a soup

2023 - The wonderful world of ramen

2022 - The end of summer

2021 - Melons - choose a good one and eat

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Hot cross buns

2018 - I love my granite bench tops

2017 - L'Osteria, Fitzroy North