If you think of your favorite comfort foods, you’ll probably notice that they have something in common. They usually have ingredients that are gathered from what supplies the cook has on hand. Tomato Gravy is an example of this. Foraging through the garden and cupboards when times are tough yields interesting, and simple, ingredients that create wonderful pots of simmering comfort.
The evolution of pie, and America’s undying bond with it, was actually a slow and messy approach – not unlike making a pie itself. Warm pie takes you home even if you’re sitting in a big table in a noisy and busy cafe that seats and serves hundreds of people and prepares nearly a million meals every single year. Pie is one of the mainstays that has enabled Southern cuisine to spread across the country. There are pie recipes from old southern cookbooks, but they survive through tradition, passed down generation-to-generation.
