Something Good from Helvetia →

Helvetia, West Virginia, is not a town you can just happen upon. About 30 miles south of Buckhannon and 40 miles southwest of Elkins (you know where those are, right?), the journey to Helvetia is a long and winding mountainous route up County Route 46. Even when you get there, it would be easy to blow right through town, were it not for the Swiss Alpine–style buildings peppered along the roadside.

The village was settled in 1869 by Swiss immigrants, many of them craftsmen, who had immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, during the Civil War. In Brooklyn, they formed a society of Swiss and German speakers called the Gruetli Verein, and together sought a place where they could live freely and practice their respective art forms. One of their members had done some surveying in West Virginia and spoke of the large tracts of land, beautiful mountains, and plentiful forests of game. The group eventually found cheap land for sale in the area and decided to establish a village, calling it Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland.

Read on in Gravy

Fat Tuesday: The Many Different Doughnuts Of Mardi Gras →

The history of doughnuts is intrinsically linked to the celebration of Mardi Gras. "Fat Tuesday" — the Christian day of revelry and indulgence before the austere season of Lent — features dough deep-fried in fat as its main staple.

Among the first foods to be deep-fried were Roman scriblita, a precursor to today's doughnuts and fritters. Originating in the medieval era, most Christian European traditions have developed a version of fried dough for Shrove Tuesday (another name for the day before Lent starts). The rich treats presented a way to use up all of the butter, sugar and fat in the house prior to the self-denying diets of Lent. Traditionally it was an opportunity for indulgence, a day when, once a year, communities would go through the labor-intensive and expensive process of deep-frying in order to partake in a luxurious treat.

Read on via NPR

Gas Station Delights →

Goin’ on a road trip across out East? Pick up a few cheap regional snacks on your way. If you’re headed west though, you better pack your own—it’s wild out there.

Moon Pie

Region: Across the South

Price: $0.89

A Tennessee icon, Moon Pies—the classic s’more sandwich of marshmallow & graham cracker cookies, coated in chocolate-- can be found in gas stations, bars, and juke joints across the South. Best enjoyed with an RC Cola, additional flavors include vanilla and banana. Do Moon Pies only come as “Double Deckers” these days? OPEN QUESTION.

Read on in The Runcible Spoon

Get Freshly Minted This Holiday Season →

When I was growing up, my uncle Richard farmed mint. In the late summer, he and his crew would mow the mint fields like hay and collect the leaves in enclosed wagons, then drive them down to the still, where they would seal them and pump them full of steam. The steam caused the oil in the leaves to turn to vapor, which re-liquefied when pushed through a condenser.

I have memories of driving out to the farm when Richard was distilling that season's crop into oil, catching whiffs of the mint on the air miles before we arrived. Then we'd pile in the farm truck and head down the dirt roads to the still, the mint essence becoming stronger and stronger until we were finally lifted over the boiling vat for the most intense sensory experience. One inhalation of the mint oil completely cleared out our sinuses and must have prevented us from catching the cold through the winter — a special Indiana farm remedy.

Read on via NPR

Cheese Pies and Kebabs Keep Armenian Heritage Alive →

For 65 years, the St. Mary Armenian Apostolic Church has been holding The Armenian Fall Food Festival in the basement of their church in the Friendship Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C. There in the serving line, women parish members dish out steaming lamb kebab, fresh tepsi boreg—phyllo dough stuffed with feta and mozzarella, and heaping ladles of hummus and eech—a vegetarian bulgur salad. In the next room, where patrons of all ages and backgrounds eat together at round tables, sits a long “bake table” filled with Armenian pasties including baklava, kataifi—shredded phyllo dough with sweet cheese or walnuts and simple syrup and haskanoush—a walnut roll topped with simple syrup.

Read on via American Food Roots

Cobbled Together: American Fruit Desserts

Cobbler. I didn't understand the dessert until I understood the word.

A professional "cobbler" is often thought of as a shoemaker and repairman, but a truecobbler is only a mender of shoes. A cordwainer is the more masterful footwear maker.

A cordwainer would not want to be called a cobbler. And a delicately latticed pie would not want to be mistaken for the less artful dessert that's thrown or "cobbled" together with disparate bits of fruit and pastry, whether it's called a cobbler, crisp, crumble, pandowdy or buckle. Though a cobbler or crisp may not be as pretty as a fresh pie or a new shoe, the result is just as functional, enjoyable and more economical, at least in terms of time and effort.

Read on via NPR

Cracker Pie: An American Classic →

When you see crackers in a pie recipe, you’re probably thinking crust—crushed graham crackers for Key Lime or Banana Cream, or maybe a saltine crust for the salty-tart Atlantic Beach Pie. But crackers in the filling? It doesn’t sound too appealing. Turns out, though, that Cracker Pie, a.k.a. Mock Apple Pie, is a classic American recipe, dating back to at least the mid-1800s. It’s mentioned in an 1858 letter from Henderson, Texas resident Sue Smith to her friend Bet. She writes,

"Bet I have learned to make a new kind of Pie I think you all would like them they taste just like an apple pie make some and try them see if you don’t love them… Take a teaspoon heaping full of tartarlic acid and dissolve it in water a teasp full of sugar and stir it in the acid then take cold biscuit or light bread and crumble in it."

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State pie project: Michigan’s tart cherries

It’s getting to be that gloriously overwhelming time of year when just about everything is ripe. So much fruit, so much pie-making potential. Going back and forth among the blueberries, raspberries, blackberries and stone fruits, I remembered that I had some Michigan friends coming to my house in a few days. Of course. Cherries. I had to get tart cherries.

Michigan, specifically Traverse City, is the cherry capital of the world. The state grows about 75 percent of the nation’s tart cherries. Down here in the Mid-Alantic where I live, tart cherries are harder to come by and the season is rather fleeting. All the more reason, then, to buy a few pints at the farmers market, bring them home and put them in a pie.

Read on via American Food Roots

Baking with Nothing in the House →

I started baking pies the summer after college. My friends and I had discovered a wealth of berry trees and bushes near the house we shared in Ann Arbor, and we’d go out on frequent picking missions. We collected so many berries that we started baking pies together in the evenings. When I moved away after that summer, my friend Margaret suggested that we start a blog to keep in touch through the pies we baked, and “Nothing in the House” was born.

Nothing-in-the-house pies, also called “desperation pies,” were popular during the Great Depression in the South and beyond. These pies were made from a few inexpensive ingredients, and include vinegar pie, cracker pie, and green-tomato pie. Thus the name of my blog is a nod to history, thrift, and practicality, in solidarity with other home bakers, past and present.

Read on in Gravy.

Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg Cup?

The humble egg cup—that cute little soft boiled-egg holding device-- is perhaps not the most frequently used piece of dishware, but it is one of the oldest! Examples of it were found at the Knossos archaeological site in Crete, and dated as early as 1700 BC. Silver versions were also found in the ruins of Pompeii.

The Dark Ages were apparently also dark for the humble egg cup, until it sprung into popularity again in the Elizabethan age (perhaps Shakespeare used one?). The holder was also favored by King Louis XV of France, who was known to show off his “egg beheading” skills to guests. A bit ironic, considering the guillotine legacy of his grandson…

Read on in The Runcible Spoon