by EMILY TEEL
photos KELSEY HANSEN
food styling CHARLIE WORTHINGTON & KELSEY MOYLAN
prop styling STEPHANIE HUNTER
recipes by ELLEN GRAY
Coast to coast, we are a pie-loving people—and never more ardently than on Thanksgiving. This year, we took a tour through community cookbooks and explored local ingredients to find inspiration for new takes on regional specialties. Hop in for our holiday road trip in pie form.
There’s no way to pick a pie that will perfectly represent an entire region, but we love the idea of celebrating Thanksgiving with desserts inspired by time-honored methods and local flavors. Knowing that people have strong opinions on iconic pies, we combed through church cookbooks and dug into historical references on regional favorites. Then we baked and baked—a weeks-long pie-eating contest that would rival any state fair—to bring you this buffet of blue-ribbon pies we hope will become national treasures.
We dreamed up a pie that’s both sweet and spicy to honor the Southwest’s deep cultural connections to Mexico. The richly flavored chocolate mousse filling is spiked with warming spices like cinnamon and cayenne, and both the crust and the brittle topping feature crunchy pumpkin seeds.
The tropical flavor and heady aroma of coconut inspired this three-layer pie. Originally brought to Hawaii by Polynesian travelers, coconuts thrive in the islands’ volcanic soil. In an effort to build the ultimate coconut pie, we lined a toasted coconut crust with chewy coconut caramel. Tender and creamy coconut milk custard fills the base, and meringue topped with curls of coconut chips crowns this showstopper.
Coffee culture, rainy weather, and wild blackberries are hallmarks of the Pacific Northwest. To make a pie as cozy as a gray morning spent in a coffee shop, we added a crunchy buckwheat granola topping to a garnet berry filling designed to be made with frozen fruit.
Pie in this region is practically a religion, and we hate to play favorites. Instead, we drew on several beloved banana desserts to invent a pie destined to be a new Southern classic. We started with New Orleans’ famous bananas Foster, then riffed on homemade banana pudding for the cookie crust and layers of sliced banana and a brown sugar cream filling.
A Pennsylvania Dutch country treat, shoofly pie appears alongside whoopie pies and apple dumplings as a sweet staple throughout the mid-Atlantic. The classic version has a sweet filling (lore has it that’s what drew flies you’d need to shoo away) made of molasses, water, and leavening, but we updated our version with coffee to balance
the deep caramel flavor of molasses. We top it with a salted crumble and coffee whip.
A sweet and tart checkerboard pie takes full advantage of the abundant cherry harvests in northern Michigan and Wisconsin. Because butter and chocolate match so well with the ruby fruit, we finished this pie with a lattice of chocolate and plain pastry. A dash of brandy in the filling is a toast to another Wisconsin favorite, the old-fashioned cocktail made with brandy, but almond extract lends just as heady an aroma if you prefer.
Pairing apple pie and cheddar cheese is an American tradition that began with English colonists and persists today in the Northeast and Midwest. In fact, when Vermont declared the apple its state fruit, the legislature specified that those serving apple pie “make a good faith effort” to also offer a cold glass of milk, a scoop of ice cream, or a slice of cheddar. This towering, golden pie balances sweet and savory with sharp cheddar in the pastry and topping. We suggest spooning a little crème fraîche on top.