400 pies across Arkansas

Cherry Crisp pie is served at Miss Anna’s on Towson’s in Fort Smith.
Cherry Crisp pie is served at Miss Anna’s on Towson’s in Fort Smith.

— A mathematician will tell you there is no way to calculate the total value of pi.

Like a mathematician, food and travel writer Kat Robinson can’t exactly calculate the value of all the pie she has consumed in the last two years while doing research for her new book, Arkansas Pie: A Delicious Slice of the Natural State.

photo

Special to the Democrat-Gazette

Bourbon chocolate chunk pecan pie is served at Greenhouse Grille in Fayetteville.

“As far as the monetary value, I have no idea,” she says.

Robinson is a former TV news producer who spent more than four years as a freelancer and who is, as of last January, the communications manager for the state Department of Parks and Tourism.

She says she spent those two years tasting and photographing pies without any specific purpose in mind while she was freelancing food articles for the Arkansas Times, as Southern correspondent for Serious Eats blog and covering the South for the Lonely Planet travel series. Oh, and while writing for and operating her own blog, TieDyeTravels.com.

But the new book from The History Press Inc., under its American Palate imprint, with photography by Robinson and Grav Weldon, came together in less than a month.

“It’s not a cookbook per se,” Robinson explains, but a lengthy and comprehensive survey of restaurant pies across the state - more than 400 in all.

“I’ve just been collecting pies and pie pictures,” she adds. “History Press came to me this summer and asked me to write a book on food in the state of Arkansas. I came back and said, ‘What can I do in 30 days,’” and the answer was “pie.”

“That was my month of August. It was a lot of being out on the road in my limited spare time. Every weekend I was headed to a certain quarter of the state to fill in the gaps in my research.

“I had tried more than 200 pies as of the end of [2011]; I took January off, didn’t have any pie.” She resumed her search in February. “I can tell you I visited 68 of the 75 counties in the state specifically to research pie.” Her search took her to Gravette, Blytheville, Lake Village, Texarkana - “literally every corner of the state,” she says.

“There are about 180 restaurants in the state where you can find good pie,” she concludes. “There are some places that don’t have good pie, and they weren’t included.”

In one 48-hour weekend stretch through the northern part of the Arkansas Delta, “we did 22 different restaurants, and found 18 pies to talk about, and that about killed us.” The itinerary, not in this order, went from just outside Helena, up through Carlisle, DeValls Bluff, Jonesboro, Walnut Ridge, Blytheville, Lepanto, Tyronza, “down to Searcy, Cabot and Beebe.”

“Mileage is tax-deductible, thank goodness,” she says. Just how many miles? “My photographer kept track of his, and I need to get that number from him.”

There’s a technique to gauging pie, of course. “You don’t eat the whole pie,”Robinson explains, or you’ll kill yourself. “You take one bite, maybe two [of each]; you ask for a box, put the box in a cooler in the back of the car, and redistribute it to friends.”

Robinson’s worst pie experience: “There’s a certain place when I was doing my Delta fried-pie research that attempted to serve me a puff pastry turnover that had been thrown into the deep fryer. It was nasty and charred; I said, ‘No! This isn’t going to work!’ I paid for it and I left.”

It’s not fried pies in general, she hastens to note. “In fact, there’s a chapter in the book that recognizes the Delta as the dominion of fried pie.”

She also has a chapter in the book about possum pie, “because you can find it all over the state,” but her particular favorite type of pie turned out to be pecan-cream cheese.

Her favorite pie, out of 400 restaurant pies? The Bourbon chocolate chunk pecan at the Greenhouse Grille in Fayetteville.

“I keep dreaming about it,” Robinson says in the book. “I’m surprised I haven’t accidentally eaten my pillow dreaming about it. It’s that good.” She includes the recipe on Page 70: “Chef Jeremy Gawthrop up there was very kind and sent it along.”

The book contains 13 recipes, most of them from restaurants she discusses, plus “a collection of odd pies, and there’s my brother’s cherry cream cheese pie that I threw in just for the heck of it.”

Back to the cost of all that pie. Robinson agreed to do a bit of figuring.

“The median price for a piece of pie is about $3.50,” says the expert. “Your high-end restaurants are going to charge $6. The most expensive pie I had was $7.50.”

All right, multiply $3.50 by 400 and you get ... $1,400.

“That’s quite a bit of pie,” Robinson agrees.

And there was a cost beyond money:

“I gained 30 pounds, and my photographer gained 20. I’m going back to my portion-control diet that I went on several years ago, and I did lose quite a bit of weight.” Robinson will sign copies of her book Friday at Historic Arkansas Museum, 5-8 p.m., during 2nd Friday Art Night and the museum’s eighth annual Nog-Off; 1-6 p.m Saturday at Eureka Thyme Gallery in Eureka Springs; and 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Dec. 22 at the Savory Pantry in Hot Springs.

Style, Pages 29 on 12/11/2012

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