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Review Tue Oct 15 2013
Slicing Into Hoosier Mama's Book of Pie
After my first look through Paula Haney's The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie: Recipes, Techniques, and Wisdom from the Hoosier Mama Pie Company with Allison Scott (Agate, $30) I wanted to send her an urgent email. "There's been some sort of error," I would write. "You've listed your key recipes. How to make your dough, what flour to buy, how to knead it, what apples to use...you're going to go under, Paula! Recall the book immediately!" I echoed this sentiment to Haney herself in person a few weeks later while standing at a kitchen workspace in her small West Town shop. Her attention was divided between chatting with me and rolling out dough to meet the next day's mountain of orders to properly answer, but she seemed unfazed by my advice. Weeks after the book's release, Haney and crew were working well beyond closing; as her husband and their young twins stopped by for a quick hello, Haney continued rolling out crust after crust as she talked excitedly about the upcoming second Hoosier Mama location in Evanston. Even if the secrets were spilled, Haney's plate remains quite full.
A pastry chef who had graced the kitchens of 312 Chicago, One Sixty Blue and Evanston's Trio, Haney found herself daydreaming of getting back to the simpler things and opening a pie shop. Just pie and coffee, but also a place that took the craft seriously and put as much effort into a slice of Lemon Chess as the creations she was churning out at Trio, alongside her colleague Grant Achatz. On Hoosier Mama's opening day in 2009, the line went out the door of the small shop, and she quickly sold out of her wares. Apparently Haney wasn't the only one who took pie seriously.
Book of Pie is chock full of practical advice, history lessons (pie was once so popular in Chicago that in 1909, an estimated 70,000 pies were sold daily), and charming anecdotes in a clean design reminiscent of the small-town feel that Hoosier Mama evokes. Haney goes through her recipe box, from sweet pies to savory, season to season. Many of the snootier, non-church group cookbooks I own are short-tempered when it comes to substituting with lesser quality ingredients; I don't keep a chilled vault of Plugra, Valrhona, or Tahitian vanilla at my home, and I suspect you don't either. However, Haney minimizes the fuss, confessing her preference for using canned pumpkin (with which I agree, as roasting a pumpkin is tedious and honestly doesn't produce a better pie), and giving the straight talk for when you need to go for the good stuff (maple syrup from Burton's, Spice House, etc.).
Even when armed with Haney's arsenal of wisdom, I could never really make a serious go at replicating her work. I have too small of a workspace, my oven is wonky, and I can't emotionally handle having that much burned pie in my possession. But the book is a warm invitation to simply try, to haul out the flour and butter, to fuss over types of apples, and to make a pie worthy of the small shop at Chicago and Ashland. You have the codes; the rest is up to you.
