Page 53 - United States of Pie

No regional cuisine in the United States is more defined
by the foods of the first European settlers than that of the Northeast.
The English immigrants who landed on New England’s coast had to
adapt their recipes to capitalize on the available crops. From the
thickets of Maine’s wild blueberries to Massachusetts’s cranberry
bogs, the New World’s bounty of indigenous fruits and vegetables

was a huge boon to our culinary inheritance. What would
Thanksgiving be without pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce?
But in true American fashion, European settlers would also come
to adapt native crops through breeding and cultivation, creating new
and unique varieties of fruits and vegetables such as the Concord
grape, a cultivar of the fox grape, native to the Northeast. Developed

in 1849 by Ephraim Bull Wales in—you guessed it—Concord,
Massachusetts, Concord grapes are the über American grape, the
grape of supermarket staples such as grape jelly and grape juice.
They’ve just started making their way to supermarkets whole and
unprocessed. However, their thick skins and high seed count make
them a time-consuming fruit with which to cook—or even to snack
on.

But one taste of a Concord grape pie will convince you they’re
worth the effort, and there’s no better place to do just that than in
Naples, New York. A small village in the Finger Lakes region, Naples
is Concord grape country: vineyards lush with dusty grapevines line
the roads into town; businesses along Route 21, Naples’s main drag,
fly flags advertising grape pies for sale; and sandwich boards dot the

corners of the intersections, pointing the way toward home
bakeshops. For more than forty years, the village has hosted the
Naples Grape Festival every September, and the 1,500-person
community swells with almost 100,000 visitors, there to wine and
dine and eat slice after slice of homemade Concord grape pie.
New York is one of the few states in the country in which it’s legal
to operate a home bakeshop, allowing individuals—most of them

women—to produce and sell small-batch baked goods from their
home kitchens. For women like Irene Bouchard, Cindy Trezciak, and
Jeni Makepeace, baking pies—especially Concord grape pies—is
more than just a hobby or even a valued family tradition. These
women are entrepreneurs whose home bakeshops—innovative