A Pie for Denise McNair: Food and Politics in The South

It should come as no surprise to any Southerner that last year’s runaway hit and Oscar contender The Help focuses on the two most plundered Southern issues of our time: food and race relations. Completing the trinity of sacred subjects in the South is football—and Roll Tide, I said ROLL TIDE—that subject is indeed religious in its fervor. But that’s another topic for another time. Today, I have the politics of food and the food of politics on my mind.

That ain’t vanilla from Mexico you’re tasting Hilly Holbrook.

We all know about that famous pie in The Help. And if you don’t know the backstory behind Minny’s terrible-awful, far be it from me to spoil it for you. Let’s just say there was more than sugar in that sucker and leave it at that. The movie did bring to mind, though, how often food and racial politics are intertwined in the movies, books and all the pundit palavering about the South. There seems to be an endless supply of all three, especially from folks who don’t live here and never have. For the record, some of what they say is true and some of it is pure hyperbole. Nonetheless, that movie made me think, and it brought to mind C.F. Penn’s Hamburgers, which made me hungry.

C.F. Penn’s Hamburgers: The best deep-fried half bread, half beef burger you will ever eat.

In the part of north Alabama where I’m from, Penn’s Hamburgers is a culinary institution. The Depression-era burgers are still prepared the same way they were for the first time almost a century ago when three of them cost a quarter. A whisper of hamburger meat is mixed with fresh soft bread crumbs and seasonings, then deep-fried. The toothsome crispy patties are sandwiched between two halves of a spongy white-bread bun, then piled high with tear-inducing fresh cut onions, a proud slathering of yellow mustard, and occasionally a melty slice of cheese. No ketchup, Yankee. Don’t even ask.

The creator, Charles F. Penn and his family lived just two doors away from me in the house I grew up in, and I can remember his wife would let me visit every day each summer like some neighborhood orphan she felt obliged to take in. I was drawn to that pretty white house with black shutters not only by Mrs. Penn’s adorable Collie dogs, but also her magnificent library (it was Mrs. Penn who got me started at 5 with a lifelong Nancy Drew obsession). I had never known anyone with a library in their home before and the idea of an entire room devoted only to books astounded me. My dad would take me at least once a week to the Penn’s on Main Street in Hartselle, and together we’d sit on the spinning bar stools at the counter and tuck into a couple of those greasy, delicious burgers while I silently savored my “special” friendship with the nice lady who loaned me books and whose family owned the place.

Penn’s Hamburgers interior, photo by Cecil Holmes

Years later, long after I had moved away from home and my immunity to Penn’s grease (which you need to eat the burgers with any regularity) had declined, my mother brought up the burger joint again, though in a much different context. It was in 2001, when I was a reporter and covering the 16th Street Church Bombing Trial in Birmingham, Alabama. Nearly 40 years after Tommy Blanton, Frank Cherry and God knows who else planned and executed a bombing that murdered four sweet little girls preparing for church services, justice was about to get served on a platter. And the whole world, it seemed, had shown up for the spectacle—there were reporters from Pravda, the BBC, and the New York Times attending, along with spectators from across the country. What I will never forget is the churchlike atmosphere of that trial, the parade of eyewitnesses to the sordid history of it all, and the defeated, haunted look in Chris McNair’s eyes when I asked him if he would be willing to speak with me on camera about the loss of his only daughter. “Someday I’m gonna tell a story,” he said, politely declining my request, and referring to the terrible-awful done to him. Earlier that day, Mr. McNair had testified about identifying the remains of his only daughter Denise, one of the four victims in the bombing, and who, in her all-too-brief lifetime, had wondered incessantly why she couldn’t order a sandwich at the same counters as white children. This was no fictional moment in a movie that could be rewound or rewritten; this was real, palpable pain born of a hatred I couldn’t even comprehend.

Denise McNair, one of four victims who died in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

When I recounted the story to my mother, she said simply that she could remember clear as anything seeing black people lined up at the back door of Penn’s Hamburgers when she was a little girl, filing in under the “Colored” sign that ushered them in separately from the white customers. She added that she always wanted to know what was so good about those hamburgers that people would suffer such humiliation just to get one. I had no idea how to respond to that, and still don’t. But it makes you think, doesn’t it? And, surely it can be no coincidence that the raging fire of the Civil Rights movement was ignited by a sit-in at a lunch counter. Breaking bread together—the act of communion—is a truly sacred thing, and to close that circle and exclude any living soul who believes in the same hereafter that you do seems to me a sin of sins.

I can’t offer much in the way of recompense. And, hell, I have my own struggles to worry about—chief among them how I am going to make it as a freelance writer if that’s the path my life takes, or if anyone even cares about what I have to say or write about (my landlord who is fond of getting rent money from me is no doubt hoping, as I do, that someone out there does). But as long as I can afford groceries, and today I can, I can do this one small thing. I can make a pie for you little Denise McNair, a true-blue Southern pie for a beautiful Southern girl. It’s just a pie, I know…but then again, in the South, a pie is never really “just a pie,” now is it?

Denise McNair’s Strawberry Pretzel Pie

Crust:

1 1/2 cups crushed pretzels

3/4 cup sugar

2/3 cup melted butter

Filling:

1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened to room temperature

1 can sweetened condensed milk

1 cup heavy whipping cream*

1 teaspoon vanilla

Topping:

1 quart strawberries, halved

1/3 cup apricot preserves

1. Preheat oven to 350°. In a large bowl, mix together pretzels, sugar and butter. Press into a deep-dish 9-inch pie pan.

2. Bake for 8-11 minutes, just until crust turns golden on the edges. Remove from oven and cool.

3. In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together cream cheese and condensed milk until mixture is light and fluffy. Add heavy whipping cream and vanilla, beating on medium low for 2-3 minutes, or just until soft peaks form. Spoon into prepared, cooled crust.

4. Layer top with halved strawberries. Place apricot preserves in a glass measuring cup or small bowl and microwave on HIGH for 20-30 seconds, just until preserves get warm and thin. Strain preserves through a fine mesh strainer and lightly brush over strawberries with a pastry brush. Chill pie 4-6 hours and serve.

* If you prefer, substitute a package of instant white chocolate pudding mix mixed with 1 cup milk or half-and-half for the whipping cream.

Pie Crust 101

Pie crust is as artful and profound a thing as a painting. Mona Lisa’s limpid, eerily lifelike eyes may follow you about the Louvre, and her coy little smile may entice you like a siren’s song, but the painting’s real power lies in the fact that we can’t really explain why the subject moves us so…she just does.

And so it goes with the pie crust—though little more than flour, fat, and water, a perfectly made pie crust is the result of hundreds of years of baking trial and error. Too little fat and it will tear or crumble after baking. Too much water and you end up with a sticky, unmanageable dough. But in the hands of a master, a perfectly baked pie crust has a tender, buttery bite that transcends the sum of its parts.

You don’t have to have the skill of Da Vinci to make one (though certainly, it helps). You do, however, have to adhere to a few time-tested principles of pastry-baking. Here are some basics to abide by:

• The key to a flaky pastry is to cut the fat into the dry ingredients so that very small pieces remain distinct—about the size of green peas.
• Avoid a tough texture by keeping the moisture to a minimum. Add just enough cold water to hold the dough together.
• After the dough is mixed, let it rest for a bit in the refrigerator. This will make it easy to roll out and produce a lighter crust.
• When rolling out the dough, dust on just enough flour to keep it from sticking.
• Opt for a metal pie pan rather than glass. They conduct heat more efficiently and develop a crisper crust.
• To blind-bake the crust, place a square of parchment in the center of the uncooked crust and top with dried beans or pie weights. Bake for about 15 minutes, or just until the crust turns slightly golden. Cool for a couple of minutes, then add the filling and finishing baking.

The Lone Pie of The Apocalypse

Fudgy Wudgy Was a Pie

When it comes to chocolate pie, as Gale says to H.I. in Raising Arizona, “I’d rather a light a candle than curse your darkness.” Like escaped jailbirds Gale and Evelle, I too have tried to straighten up and fly right, but no matter how many diets I go on, or how much weight I am determined to lose, chocolate pie suckers me in every time. And as surely as H.I. will find a convenience store not on the way home or snatch one of the sleeping Huffhine quintuplets right out of his crib, I will break any diet any day for a slice of chocolate pie—no matter how good my intentions may be.

Now, if you’ve ever been to a barbecue joint worth its sauce in the South, then you know that the standard sides consist of baked beans, vinegar slaw and potato salad, and the dessert du jour is almost always homemade pie. There is usually a lemon meringue on the menu, along with coconut cream, sometimes chess—but there is always, and I mean always, chocolate cream pie. In fact, the first chocolate pie I can ever remember eating was a creamy, fudgy wedge from Big Bob Gibson’s in Decatur, Al, near my hometown of Hartselle. My mother worked like a madwoman to recreate the recipe, and she not only did, she perfected it, if I do say so myself. Her secret was using a little brown sugar in the custardy filling to round out the chocolate and an extra splash of vanilla for depth of flavor. Her final version remains my favorite chocolate pie of all time.

Not so long ago, though, I found myself wanting something pie-ish and tart-ish all at the same time—which, in a pinch, a chocolate chess pie will provide. It’s a little bit of both—creamy, but more substantial than a pudding-like filling. Problem is, me and chess pie don’t geehaw. No matter how many I make, I can never get chess pie to set up properly, so I abandoned that plan pretty quickly, poked around my mother’s old cookbooks, borrowed a little from this recipe, a little from that recipe, pulled my cocoa out of the pantry, and got down to business.

I have to say, what I came up with was so good, I nearly swooned at the first bite. Most of it, I will confess without an ounce of shame, was eaten with a fork right out of the pan in a sybaritic frenzy in the middle of the night. I didn’t even bother to turn the lights on. I call it the Lone Pie of the Apocalypse, because like Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona, it lays waste to everything in its path, including your diet. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Lone Pie of the Apocalypse

1 cup Graham cracker crumbs

6 T butter, divided

1 C sugar, divided

1/4 C roughly chopped almonds

1 1/2 cups milk or cream

4 T cocoa powder

1/4 C brown sugar

3 egg yolks, lightly beaten

3 T flour (can also use Wondra flour)

1 t vanilla

Whipped cream

 

1. Preheat oven to 350°

2. Combine Graham cracker crumbs, 5 T butter, 1/4 C sugar and chopped almonds; press evenly into a 9-inch pie pan. Bake for 10 minutes.

3. In a saucepan, combine milk or cream, cocoa powder, 3/4 C sugar and egg yolks. When mixture starts to heat, whisk in flour to thicken, and continue whisking while mixture is slightly bubbly.

4. Remove from heat and stir in 1 T butter, and vanilla. Pour into crust and bake 20 minutes, or until firm and set.

5. Chill 4-6 hours and serve with whipped cream.