Pie Town Cookbook from Pie Town, New Mexico

Yep, today’s about the Pie Town Cookbook. I got this the one and only time I went to Pie Town, to experience the Pie Festival1.

See, Bill and I attended undergrad in a town in New Mexico that’s about an hour and a half from Pie Town. Bill, being the younger man that he is, was in school a couple of years later than I was. Then he decided to go for his M.Sc. at the same school. Eventually, he realized how much better “the real world” pays than grad school pays, but in the time between my graduating and his leaving graduate school, he heard about the Pie Town Pie Festival and went with his friends once or twice.

I was visiting one year after he’d left graduate school, and ended up going with a group of folks, including him, to the festival. On top of that, we saw some other folks we knew from Socorro there. Turns out that pie can motivate someone to drive an hour and a half from one small town in New Mexico to another. Or, in his case, something like four hours…

Mostly, we wandered around looking at the vendors (very few of them2; it is a fairly small, rural town), chatting with people (folks we knew and folks we didn’t), and just looking at the area. Watching kids play and eat pie. Standing in line for the lunch (it was barbecue, and it was really good; came with pie). Then we went looking for more pie. It was the pie festival, after all.

Amusingly, he drove all that way and only got about three slices of pie. Which were shared with others. Why? Because the town ran out of pie. The whole dang town! Pie Town! Out of pie! No more pie at the Pie-O-Neer or The Daily Pie! All the people who we’d promised we’d bring back whole pies for? OUTTA LUCK!

Rumor has it that the town just had a wildly larger number of attendees than they’d even remotely predicted. I vaguely recall overhearing someone (someone who would know? who knows?) mention that they’d expected attendance to double that year over the last, and it’d something like quadrupled. When I mentioned this to my mother she told me that AAA New Mexico had featured the festival a month or so before, complete with adorable little girl holding a gorgeous pie on the cover. I’ve wondered since then if AAA New Mexico cause a major, one-year spike, or if there’s been a sustained increase in festival business since then.

ANYWAY. As of this writing, I’ve made two or three pies out of this cookbook, and they’ve been delicious. I’ve also made two pie crust recipes, and they have been less so. However! I don’t blame the recipes, in this case. Pie crusts are notoriously hard to make, and I’d never tried before we made the first batch so I’m just kind of assuming it will get better as I learn more.

Number of recipes in this cookbook: 400 (Estimated)
Number we’ve made: 43

You can click the “pie town cookbook” tag below to see all the recipes we’ve made from this book.



fn1. Man, if I can get back to New Mexico at just the right time this year, I can “smell roasting chiles”:http://metacookbook.com/permalink/red-chile-bible.html AND go to the “Pie Town Pie Festival”:http://www.pietowncouncil.com/pie_festival/pie_festival_location.html. Let’s consider it a tentative date, shall we?

fn2. Looking at the website, maybe they are growing! There’s a LOT more vendors listed than there were set up the year I went.

fn3. {badwordsgohere} I made pie crust, a different recipe, out of this book for Thanksgiving. How did I manage not to document it AT ALL on this site? WELL, mark my words folks, up it’s going to go! And then this number shall change. SO THERE.

2 thoughts on “Pie Town Cookbook from Pie Town, New Mexico

  1. Have I given you my pie crust recipe? It never fails. Except in Baltimore when it’s humid. So, you know, June until October.

    • Nope, never. But if humidity’s a problem, it will work even less often in Chicago, since we seem to be humid the season that’s not winter.

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