Page 57 - United States of Pie

quality table, where Jeni rolls out round after round of dough during
pie-making season.
Unlike Irene or Cindy, Jeni uses vegetable oil to make her crusts,

and only a bit of flour to thicken the filling. I love that each woman
has her own particular recipe for making Concord grape pie. The
variety in their methods reminds me that each pie is the end result of
these women’s traditions and histories, the lessons they learned
from other bakers—their friends, sisters, mothers, and
grandmothers.
For Jeni, Grape Festival weekend is a haul. The hours are long,
but as Jeni describes baking late into the night, the pulp staining her

hands, Eminem and gangsta rap booming from the stereo as a
group of friends helps her assemble the hundreds of pies, it occurs
to me that she’s describing the modern-day equivalent of a quilting
bee. These women gather together to socialize and to help one
another out, producing a handcrafted heirloom product—just

substitute a syrupy pie for the snugly quilt. “It’s a neat community
thing,” Jeni says. “There are a lot of hands that go into making one
pie.”
I pulled out of Jeni’s driveway, hens clucking behind me,
profoundly grateful to have met her and the other home bakers of
Naples. When I first arrived in Naples, the town—so quaint and so
picturesque—struck me as frozen in time, straight out of a Norman

Rockwell painting. Then I met Irene, Cindy, and Jeni, modern women
whose lives are inextricably intertwined with the town. Each of them
saw a niche in the market, and they gladly filled it with flour, sugar,
lard, tapioca, vegetable oil, and, of course, lots of grapes.
As I glanced over my shoulder at the many boxes of pie stacked in
my backseat (what, you didn’t think that Cindy or Jeni would send

me home empty-handed, did you?), I saw more than the delicious
treats awaiting me at the end of my long drive. I saw a generosity of
spirit in pie form. Each one of the women I met baked without
constantly looking over her shoulder to see what the next big baker
was up to. Each was confident in her ability, and pleased with the
pies that she made. Later, biting into what would be my first slice of
many, I found that this generosity of spirit was something you could