America as told through pies

Some might argue that pie is the quintessential American dessert. Certainly Stacey Mei Yan Fong makes that argument in her cookbook. Fong’s “50 pies, 50 states” is an “immigrant’s love letter” to this country as told through pie. OPB’s Crystal Ligori talked to Fong at the 2023 Portland Book Festival.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Happy Thanksgiving. There is a good chance that there is a pie baking somewhere near you at this very moment. Whether it’s pecan, pumpkin, apple or something else, some folks argue that pie is the quintessential American dessert. Stacey Mei Yan Fong makes that argument in her cookbook “50 pies, 50 states.” She calls it an “immigrant’s love letter” to this country, as told through pie.

OPB’s Crystal Ligori talked to Fong at the 2023 Portland Book Festival.

[Audience applause]

Crystal Ligori: Hey y’all you ready to talk about pie? [Cheering]

So Stacey is a home baker and the author of “50 pies, 50 states: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the United States Through Pie.” Born in Singapore, Stacey lived in Indonesia, grew up in Hong Kong and moved to the States to pursue a degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She spent a decade in the fashion industry. During that time, she launched the 50 Pies/50 States project, with the idea of creating a pie for every state for however long it took for her permanent U.S. visa to process. That visa was approved in 2017, but the project took a little bit longer. She finished her final pie in 2022.

She now lives in Brooklyn and this is her first time to Oregon. So give it up y’all!

[Applause]

Fong: I’m very happy to be here

Ligori: Stacey, thank you so much for joining us. So the title of our conversation today is “American pie” and it really feels like pie is often just synonymous with American culture. Two of the places that you grew up were British Colonies though. So you kind of saw pie outside of that American lens.

Fong: For me, growing up, pie was always like a savory thing. I only ever ate it for meals. I played rugby in high school and we would get like a meat pie at the Tuck Shop right after that. So I only ever thought of it as a savory thing, like a full meal. And then when I came to the States on vacation with my dad, because he used to work in the hotel industry, I was like, “whoa, you can get apple pie a la mode,” there’s like custard pies, there’s like all these different kinds of fruit pies. I would watch different movies with my dad every Sunday. And whenever it was like a movie set in America, people would go to diners and eat pie, go on dates and eat pie, go home and eat pie. I was like, “pie is amazing!” It runs the gamut of savory and sweet, like dessert, and there’s all these stories and lore that’s tied to it.

Ligori: Totally. What were your images of pie through that lens of Americana when you were growing up? Because I know that you were talking about in movies and stuff … So were you ever looking at a pie on TV and you’re like, hm, “I wanna eat that pie”?

Fong: Every single time. [Laughter] My favorite movie is “When Harry Met Sally.” And when Meg Ryan orders her pie and how particular she is with it. I absolutely love that because, well, funny sidebar story – when I first moved to the States, this guy that I fancied took me to a Denny’s and I tried to order poached eggs … and that’s my own problem. But yeah, like I always just found it so amazing. America, to me, felt so abundant. Everything was bigger. There was so much of it, even pie-wise. The pies were so high, like all the fruit is piled up, all the meringue is piled up, everything just seems so lush. There was so much possibility, so much stuff to eat.

Ligori: How do you think pie brings people together?

Fong: I feel like when I started really baking pie and diving into the idea of pie, anytime you would talk about pie with someone, they always had a funny story or a tender story about a pie their mom would make, or a pie their grandma would make, or something they would make during Thanksgiving. It’s all very wholesome, and pie is something that you can eat by yourself, if you believe in yourself enough. But it’s something that’s so nice when it’s shared.

When I was making the pies for the cookbook, I made a lot of bad pies – major props for my friends that had to eat them. And that was the funny conversation part of it, right? Because when I got to a certain state that my friend was from, they would eat the pie with me, we would start talking about how the pie tasted if I got it right. And then it would conjure up like stories from their childhood or something that they can relate it to. Pie holds so much story in two crusts, you know?

Ligori: Totally. And that’s an interesting point because each of these pies is not just created for a specific state, it’s also created with a specific person in mind. So, because this is sort of like a road trip as well, were you picking the pie first or the person first when you were going through each state?

Fong: I’m like … “what did I do?” [Laughter] Well, when I first started the project in 2016, so, a long time ago. When everybody’s like, “oh, you took so long to do this project,” it’s my own ding, dang project. I could have taken another 10 years if I wanted to. I had a spreadsheet that had like all the states, all their state slogans, if they had a dedicated state food or fruit. And I kind of had an idea of who I would give the pie to if I knew someone from that state. When I wrote the book, I had not met anyone from Oregon; now, I know all of you. So I’m very blessed in that sense.

But it was kind of like half and half, I think. And I think by figuring out the pie situation and what I was gonna bake, I also had to talk more to the person I was gonna give the pie to and ask them questions about food that they ate growing up, or things that they held dear from their state. It allowed me to get to know them at a different level, which is very interesting as well.

Ligori: When you started creating the pies while waiting for your visa and the subtitle is a “Love Letter to the U.S.,” how does love and pie intersect, or love and food intersect?

Fong: I mean, it’s one and the same, right? I grew up in a Chinese household, and notoriously, a Chinese household isn’t the most touchy, feely, “I love you,” a lot of emotions or anything. But there were simple acts that my dad would do or my grandparents would do [where] I would know that they loved me. Like my grandma would always ask me, “have you eaten yet?” And there would always be like cut fruit on the table or there would be like warm rice. There were these little significant things because no one in my family was a particularly good cook. But we were all really good at eating. So having the idea of asking someone, “have you eaten yet,” was kind of like showing how you cared for them.

Michael Pollan said once in the quotes in my book: “Is there anything less selfish than making something nourishing for someone that you love?” And that’s kind of what I brought into this project. And also, because I came from a kind of emotionally withholding household, by doing this, I taught myself how to give my friends their roses when they were due. I got to Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, like rom-com style be like, “Laura Rinaldi is my best friend and she got the Connecticut pie because she lets me FaceTime her in the morning,” and we lie our heads on our pillows and talk about our day ahead. How wonderful that I have this person in my life. And you probably have your own version of a Lauren Rinaldi in your life. And to be able to share pie, talk about pie, give someone food and show them how you love in a physical form is kind of a beautiful thing.

Ligori: Yeah, it really resonated with me. I’m from a half-Greek, half-Italian household. It’s like you have a fight with your parents and then an hour later, they’re like, “well, here’s some apples cut up for you.” And you’re like, “thanks mom, sorry, I yelled.” So I feel like that really resonates with me so much.

For the project, the very first introduction to readers before they start baking is to say, “have good tunes on.” So let’s talk about the relationship between music and baking for you. What’s your favorite music to bake to? Does it help you sort of overcome potential kitchen failures?

Fong: One hundred percent, I love music. I particularly really love old country music because it’s really good storytelling. John Prine is an incredible example of someone that … he was a mailman that walked around, had songs in his head the whole time, and was writing poetry about the political climate in America or how he felt about a lady. It’s like all these things, where if you have this good vibe in your kitchen, and you’re baking, and you’re making something for someone, that energy or that vibe – I know it sounds hokey – goes into your pie.

Another person who I love the most is Dolly Parton. [Cheering] I feel like everything people love about America, or all the goodness of America, lies in the center of Dolly Parton. And I’ve been listening to Dolly Parton since I was a little girl, which is really funny to listen to “Tennessee Mountain Home” while you’re staring at the South China Sea. But it truly had hell of the same weight for me.

Someone recently, my friend Jenny, made a playlist on Spotify of all the songs that I mentioned in the book, which I think the playlist is 54-songs long, in like four hours. But yeah, I love music. It plays a huge part in the way I write. It plays a huge part in the way I think. And I have songs that I tie specifically to each memory I have, which I don’t know if that’s good or not. But, yeah, whenever I get sad or if something catastrophic happens in the kitchen, I have this ritual where I’ll listen to “Atlantic City” by The Band two times and then I’ll be like, “OK, everything is fine.” I’ll just put some makeup on and everything will be OK. But, yeah, music is the best.

Ligori: I feel like that leads really well into the next thought I had because some of the pies, a lot of the pies in this book … let me show it. I have not shown it yet, which is my bad. A lot of the pies are super-duper ambitious, not just in how they’re made but also in the decorations. And more than one of your pies have crust portraiture, especially the one from Tennessee. And that has Miss Dolly Parton, herself, on it.

Fong: When I got to the state of Tennessee, the only person I could really dedicate it to – besides my friend Miles – was the love of my life, Dolly Parton. And so the pie for Tennessee is a sausage and gravy pie because that’s her favorite breakfast. And I decided to make a portrait of her in pie form. It was really funny to eat Dolly Parton, [Laughter] but you want to consume the people that you love, right? You want them to like live inside of you. So that was the pie for Tennessee.

I feel like, for me, since I’m a self-taught baker, I’m a home cook, I kind of got to look at pie in a totally different way. I wasn’t tied down by the constraints of doing it correctly. And the way that I formulated each pie was I thought about it crust up. So I would think about the way the crust would be flavored, the texture in the center. If there was something crispy, crunchy on the top, because I love different textures.

And yeah, I think what was freeing too is that, because I’m not American, I was looking at a state from a totally fresh set of eyes. Have I done some pies in the book that people disagree with? One hundred percent. But you’re allowed. This is my journey and if people felt that they would have done something different from their state, I welcome that discourse.

Ligori: They can make their own pie.

Fong: [Laughter] They can make their own pie. I love that conversation. And that’s another reason why I decided to do pie because coming from a different country, coming to America, the 50 states could essentially be 50 different countries. People have different accents, people eat different food. The climate is different. If you look at Arizona to New York, where I live, to Oregon, where we’re sitting right now, it could technically be three different countries. And people are so passionate about where they grew up, what they come from, the food that they ate growing up, that if I did sausage and grapefruit [for] Tennessee and you felt that I should have done something different, tell me, like I wanna know. Because another thing is, people here think that, traditionally, pie here is sweet. So it’s fun to take a savory route. And if you’re willing to try it, just give it a shot … highly recommend it.

Ligori: I did wanna flip as quickly as I could to the Dolly page, so everyone could see this gorgeous portrait. I feel like the portraits and a lot of the decorations on your pies also speak to your background in design. Was that something that you were thinking about consciously when you were making the pies? You were like, they can’t all have a lattice top, right?

Fong: So you kind of eat with your eyes first. I am not good at buying wine; I judge a wine by its label. That’s just the way I am. And I wanted the pie to be visually appealing. And also because I worked in design, I just thought about the way my book was gonna look, the way each state was gonna look when we photographed it, because it’s the same thing. It’s pie, it’s a circle ...

Ligori: There is one rectangle in the book.

Fong: But it’s the same thing. How can I make this look different? And again, I made a spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, I made little stories for the way I wanted each state to look. Like for Kansas, I knew it was gonna be around 5 p.m. That’s what I wanted the lighting to be like. And because I am a huge Taylor Swift fan, I wanted there to be like little Easter eggs in it. For Kansas, for example, there’s like a tiny check blue gingham tablecloth. It’s supposed to look like Dorothy’s dress, and then salt and pepper shakers that are red. It’s just these tiny details that I got to enjoy, I think to my editor’s detriment because I was so lost in the details. But it’s something that I wanted you to open the page to Oregon and be like, oh yeah, this does remind me of what it looks like in Oregon. And I wanted to keep it spicy, interesting.

Ligori: Yeah, definitely. So let’s get into the pies. So the start of the book is actually additional pies to the 50 states’ pies. And they aren’t for American states, the first two pies, but are dedicated to the places you grew up. Can you walk us through the Singapore pie, which is a pandan cream pie, and how the elements for that came together?

Fong: Yeah. So when I was putting the book together, I thought it would be really important to bake some pies that are based on where I was born, where I grew up, where I live now. I basically call them like the first three dates. You go on three dates with me and you figure out if you want to go on a 50-state road trip – it’s a big dedication. [Laughter]

For the Singapore pie, it’s a pandan custard pie. Pandan is a very, very common flavor in Singapore and Malaysia. It’s kind of, I would say, herbal, but it’s got this coconutty-like vibrant flavor, and it’s the most punchy shade of green. And I knew that, for Singapore, I wanted it to be a pandan custard pie. I knew that I wanted the crackers to be this one brand called Khong Guan, which is basically … I was gonna say like the Nabisco of Singapore, like a little bit of a pie that was dedicated to my grandpa. I grew up in Hong Kong, but my extended family, like my grandpa, lived in Singapore. So I would, whenever we would go back to visit, catch him up on all the toddler hot goss in Hong Kong. And because I would talk and talk and talk, and me and my sisters were the last set of grandchildren, he was like, over it. So he would just constantly feed me these like custard biscuits so I would shut up.

I knew that’s what the crust had to be. I knew there had to be coconut elements. And I knew it had to be pandan because whenever we left Singapore, we would stop at this one bakery called Bengawan Solo. And they would make this pandan chiffon cake that was like a foot tall. It was this tall and it would come in this bright red box. My dad would make us carry it on the plane. And either me or one of my sisters would have to sit on the plane like this with the cake box.

At the time, we were like, this is insane. But then, once we got back to Hong Kong, I had this wonderful piece of cake to share with each other. That was very special.

Ligori: I love that. So I am not a baker. I am an eater and a lover of food ...

Fong: Crystal is a baker. She bakes this pie.

Ligori: It always felt sort of out of reach for me to make, which is why I was very surprised how accessible all of the recipes felt. I felt like I had to bake the Oregon pie, obviously.

[Applause]

Fong: It’s so beautiful.

Ligori: Well, we have not eaten it. So I feel like maybe we should hold applause for a little bit later, but it is marionberry. Of course, it has a hazelnut crunch topping. But when you were creating these recipes, were you creating them with the idea that someone else is gonna make them after you? I know in the initial project, you just had the pie without a full recipe to it. So when you were sort of approached about making this an actual book, how was it sort of going back to be like, oh, I want a person to be able to make this, I don’t want it to just be gorgeous pictures?

Fong: It was kind of crazy in the recipe testing sense, but also in the sense where I was revisiting the person I was and the baker I was when I had … Like my friend, who got Alabama, joked that the last time he got to eat Alabama was 2016. Then I baked him another pie when the book came out. So it was like a funny situation where, when I started this project, it was purely selfish. I did it because I was in a really tough time in my life. I was 25 in New York working in fashion, which sounds kind of drab, but also kind of fab at the same time. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I was a handbag designer. I really liked it, but I kind of got good at a thing that I was losing passion for. And at the time, my roommate of seven years was moving out. I got my heart broken, my grandma passed away and I couldn’t go home because of my visa status. So I was like, what am I gonna do to metaphorically bake myself out of a hole? And I had baked my way through the entirety of the “Four & Twenty Blackbirds” cookbook.

We’ll fast forward a little bit and I did end up baking there for a couple of years, which was very poetic. But I decided, OK, I’m gonna focus and I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna give myself this project. So I got to come home after a long day of talking to factories and doing fashion. And I got to make these pies for myself, to share with my friends. And I never thought that a cookbook would be a possibility. It just didn’t feel attainable to me. So, now it clearly has happened – it clearly has happened, it’s sitting right there. But now that it has happened, I couldn’t be more thankful and blessed that this bing-bong project that I started in my tiny Brooklyn apartment led me to sitting on a church stage talking to you guys.

It’s truly so wild where a slice of pie can take you. This is like a testament to that and it harbors back to watching movies where people would make pie pit stops, right? Like these slices of pie are taking them to their next stop or taking them to their next journey. And I kind of did that through baking all these pies, and figuring out who I was gonna give it to, and figuring out what I was gonna put in each pie. I also figured out that this is my home and my home is metaphorical; it’s not like a place, right? It’s not like a physical building. My home is inside of me and lives inside of the people that I surround myself with. And I feel like getting to that journey in the most delicious way possible, which is pie, is pretty wonderful.

I baked myself out of a hole … and into a church. [Laughter]

Ligori: I love that. What was the actual testing like? How many times are you making a pie before you’re like, “well, this is the recipe”?

Fong: Even when I was in just the project stage, I gave each pie a month because I still had a full-time job at the time and I wanted to be able to fully focus. So I would do the research. I would make all the elements. Then I would make a mini version and I would test that. Then I would make the full version and alter it a little. It was a lot like self-testing, which was kind of nice because I did all this pre-work before the book. So I had all these notes.

Yeah, it was a lot of work, but it was very delicious work.

Ligori: So let’s talk a little bit about how you’re doing the research for this because I know that many of the states that you created pies for you’d never been to, including Oregon. This is your first time. So, first, how do you like it?

Fong: I love it. I love it. I’m having a really good time. I’m eating very well.

Ligori: And I know that your friends have since moved away, but now you have all of us to come back and visit. How did you get a sense of the states that you hadn’t visited in order to create the pie for that place?

Fong: It was honestly talking to strangers. It would be doing some research or asking people questions on the internet, asking the person that I was giving the pie to. It’s truly not being afraid to just talk to someone. Since I did move around so much as a kid, I got really good at being like the new kid in class and be like, “hello, I’m Stacey, want to befriend me?” And, yeah, it was a lot of talking.

I feel like the best example of how this project is so wonderful is when I did the research for South Dakota. When I got to South Dakota, I truly did not know what I was gonna do. I had barely met anybody that had been to South Dakota. It seemed so far away from me. And because the universe is kind of wonderful, my friend Matt, who got the Massachusetts pie, he had just done a design project for a bunch of historians in South Dakota. He was like, “you should talk to Eric.” So I cold emailed Eric and was like, “hi Eric, would you like to talk to me about pie, and South Dakota, and all the stuff?” And he introduced me to the work of Chef Sean Sherman. Bought his cookbook; read it cover to cover. Ended up going to South Dakota. That was my last trip, in 2020, going to this basically stranger’s house in South Dakota to eat pie with him.

It ended up being a beautiful thing because South Dakota got to celebrate Native American cuisine. And then it made me question, as someone that’s moved here and can eat Cantonese cuisine and Flushing in New York and like Sichuan food. And I can eat Singaporean food and I can eat Malaysian food. I was like, how come I can’t also get Native American cuisine on seamless, like I can everything else. I mean, that’s a much larger conversation for a different day. But it allowed me to explore, in a very small amount, how to make my own sunflower milk, how to make a wild rice pudding using blue corn. It was fun to experiment, I guess, like take mini-trips in my kitchen.

Ligori: For the recipe creation, you went all out. And you, yourself, at the top of this said, the only sort of real structure you kept was that it was in a circle …

Fong: But there’s one rectangle.

Ligori: All but one. [Laughter] So, the Idaho pie, for example, is a little bit of carb, on a little bit of carb, on a little bit of …

Fong: It’s a lasagna of carbs, layers of carb.

Ligori: It’s a hash brown crust. It’s mashed potatoes and it’s a scallop potato topper. Also Nevada’s pie, which I’m guessing Nevada’s pie is pretty polarizing.

Fong: Nevada and Minnesota, I’ve realized, are the most polarizing pies in the book.

Ligori: So Nevada’s pie is a nod to all-you-can-eat buffets in Vegas and includes shrimp cocktail, New York strip steak and cheesecake, each in their own dedicated pie slice. So maybe let’s talk about this. And also, do all recipes just work as pie?

Fong: Yes and no. So when I got to Nevada, I was like, huh? Like, what do I do, fill this pie with sand and some poker chips? What am I supposed to do? And the only memory I had was … my dad used to work in hotels and we went to Vegas because he was doing some dad job. You know how like your dad has a job and you’re like, “my dad has a job.” [Laughter] And we went to Vegas. We went to all these different hotels and they had all-you-can-eat buffets. I was like, whoa, this is so crazy. There is so much food. There was just so much food everywhere.

So I made another spreadsheet. And in the spreadsheet, I wrote down the names of all the casinos, the common denominators of everything that you can find at an all-you-can-eat buffet, like prime rib, crab legs, all of that. And I was like, how can I do this in pie form? Because I also collect cast iron pans, I had this large corn bread, cast iron pan where the cast iron is split into eight triangles. I was like, what if I blind baked the crust? So it’s little cups, which are kind of like the chafing dishes in a buffet. This is also the craziness that happens in my kitchen. It’s just me spiraling like this, but it’s like the little chafing dishes that I could fill with different toppings. So I was like, I’ll split it into two. There’ll be an herbed crust and it’ll eat like caesar salad, shrimp cocktail, crab legs and then like prime rib with mashed potatoes. And then in an all-butter crust on the sweet side, it’s like cheesecake, chocolate mousse, ice cream sundae, fruit tart.

You got to have your cake and eat it too, because when you go to Vegas, you wanna have whatever you want, right? You want everything in abundance and you wanna feel like it’s all yours. And that’s what I wanted – the pie to feel like you could have every element of the all-you-can-eat buffet, and at once. When we shot the pie, the story that I created was, I wanted [it] to look like 4 a.m. in a casino and it’s the floor of the casino. And there’s shrimp tails everywhere, and the pies in the center, and there’s poker chips. It was just crazy abundance and people are like, “that’s ridiculous.” I’m like, “yeah, no, it’s fine.”

Ligori: That is a pie that’s intended for a one person pie, right?

Fong: Yeah, it’s all yours.

Ligori: So let’s talk a little bit about ingredients. One of my favorite things about your pies is how you really choose to highlight specific regional flavors. Not just the ones that feel like a no-brainer, like Oregon’s marionberry and hazelnut, but also things like Cheerwine, which is a soda from North Carolina that you used to braise pulled pork for that pie … or even Pork Roll/Taylor Ham, depending on what side you’re on, for the New Jersey pie. So how difficult was it to source ingredients and know you were getting sort of the real deal? You weren’t just getting blackberries, you were getting marionberries.

Fong: I think what’s really great is, because we have the internet, we can order stuff from everywhere. And another fun part about America is there’s so much regional soda, which I found really wonderful. I love Cheerwine. And I used another regional soda for Maine. I used Moxie, which is basically like a bitter root beer. It’s very delicious. It’s kind of like drinking an Amaro, and I would boil it down and make these weird syrups and stuff. Because I was kind of thinking about using elements that would flavor the pie in a different way and I wanted it to … for me to describe the pie and for you to be like, “yes, that’s North Carolina.” It might not be a pie you would typically see, but there were elements in it that you were like, yes, definitely that state.

Ligori: I think this sort of leads nicely into talking about people’s reactions to your pies, especially from folks who maybe grew up or have a really definitive vibe towards a certain state. What has the feedback been like?

Fong: Mostly really good. It’s been really, really positive. I mean, there are always gonna be people that disagree, but I invite that discourse and it’s totally fine. This, at the root of it, is my journey home – me figuring out America, me figuring out like my place in this world. Have I figured that out fully? Not yet. I don’t think anybody really does, but most of the reaction has been really positive. And honestly, the most wonderful thing is that people will either write me an email or slide into my DMs and share stories about how they’ve eaten pie growing up, or pie that they’ve made, or how they’ve made my pie, and they’ll send me a photo.

It’s truly so, so wonderful that, like I said before, this tiny project brought me so many new people into my life. And I like the fact that people are willing to share their family’s recipes with me or talk to me about a pie memory, I’m so blessed to have that now.

Ligori: Yeah, I mean, there are incredible pies to choose from – 58. But I picked a few that sort of stood out to me that I’d love to talk about, different from the rest for a variety of reasons: Maryland, Oklahoma and Massachusetts. I’ll explain what they are. So to jog your memory, Maryland is an Old Bay blue crab dip pie with a spicy, Old Bay crust. Oklahoma is a blueberry pie, but they’re hand pies. So they’re fried hand pies. And then Massachusetts is a Boston cream pie pie, since Boston cream pie is not a pie.

Fong: Yes, exactly.

Ligori: So, let’s talk about each one of those and sort of your creation of those.

Fong: With Maryland, I feel like … I love John Waters and I’ve watched a lot of John Waters movies. When you talk about Baltimore, when you talk about Maryland, everybody that I knew that’s from there, all they ever talked about was blue crab season, and eating crabs, and the smell of Old Bay wafting through the air. I was like, OK, it’s gonna be an Old Bay crab pie. And the way I like to crimp my pies, the crimps on the edge are pretty flat. And what I love to do with it, especially with the Maryland pie, is break the crims off and dip it in the center while you’re eating it. So it’s more textural. But yeah, for Maryland, it made itself, like it had to be Old Bay.

For Oklahoma, it was more like, what can I do that’s like a fruit pie that’s different? And I found out about Arbuckle Mountain fried pies, and they fry their pies in lard. It’s just so delicious. It’s just like the thick, sweet, syrupy center with the pie crust fried in lard. So it puffs up and it’s all crispy, crunchy. And then there’s just like powdered sugar all over at the top. It’s just such an experience.

Ligori: And then what about the Boston cream pie? So in my mind – and this is a person who knows nothing about Boston cream pie – I was like, that’s like a doughnut filling or something. Like I didn’t really know. And then I was like, oh, it’s a cake and then you turned it into a pie. So let’s talk about that.

Fong: So it started and it’s called a pie because, before cake pans were invented, everything was baked in pie pans or like a style of pie pan. So it was called a pie, but it’s actually a cake. It’s very confusing. So I was like, how can I turn the Boston cream pie into an actual pie? So it is an all butter crust. It’s got a chocolate ganache, like a custard filling. And then, since I thought it’d be really funny to put pound cake on it, it’s sprinkled in pound cake. So you still get your cake, you still get your custard. But it’s all in a portable form, because you can hold it in your pie crust.

Ligori: I love that. So the bulk of the baking for this book happened when you had a full-time job in fashion, but the pandemic kinda changed that and gave you a little bit of an out. Can you tell us about working at Four & Twenty Blackbirds?

Fong: Yeah. It was amazing. I loved working at the bakery. I lost my job in fashion during the pandemic. And I looked at my life and I was like, I’m gonna do a hard pivot. What can I do? Because fashion was great. I still have a passion for fashion, but I was like, what can I do to make myself happy? And working on the pie project made me so happy. Being in my kitchen made me so happy and I needed a job. I lost my job. So I cold emailed all these bakeries in the city. Four & Twenty Blackbirds ended up writing back to me and I did my trial day there. I got hired and I got to bake pie at a whole nother level.

I was a home baker, a pretty good home baker. But I did know about cracking 120 eggs for one pie filling to make 18 quarts. And it basically felt like I was doing crossfit for eight hours a day. But it felt amazing, like it was so fun. Getting to work with Melissa and Emily Elsen, who were like my idols and getting to learn from them, getting to learn from Rica, my supervisor and learning to bake pie at a totally different level was so cool. You know how they say, never meet your idols and never know how the sausage gets made. I went straight to the sausage factory and I had such a good time.

I got to bake, during Thanksgiving, 735 pies in three days. It sounds exhausting, which it was. But it’s also so cool that I got to experience that. And it’s only made me a better baker. I looked at my crimps when I started this project to where I am now, and it’s just so fun to keep learning and keep understanding things. I’m a home baker and I’m not the person that will teach you how to make the perfect pie. And I spend a lot of my nights watching Erin Jeanne McDowell’s pie videos, because I love her so much and I love learning from her.

Yeah, getting to work at Four & Twenty Blackbirds allowed me to go to a pie boot camp. And I couldn’t be more thankful that I lost my job.

Ligori: And emailing Four & Twenty Blackbirds was intentional because that is also sort of one of the cookbooks that you cooked through when you sort of started your pie journey, right?

Fong: Yeah. And they have a pie that I dedicated to them in the book. So they got famous for their salty honey pie. I made a pie dedicated to them that uses golden syrup, which is more common in British and Western-ish Hong Kong cuisine. So, yeah, it was my little ode to them.

Ligori: This idea of cold emailing someone and having it turn into something sort of beyond your wildest dreams, I’d love to talk about that, because you cold emailed Four & Twenty to get your foot in the door there, to bake there. But then, for your book, that was also a cold email … but from someone else to you, saying, “hey, have you ever thought about making this blog and this project into a book?”

Fong: So the beauty of a cold email and why I love a cold email so much, is that what you are cold emailing about doesn’t belong to you. So you have really nothing to lose, right? Like you’re gonna cold email this person and they’re gonna be like, “yes,” or they’re gonna be like, “no” – you have no skin in the game, nothing has been exchanged. So if they don’t reply, whatever.

What was so wonderful is, my editor, Michael Szcherband, cold emailed me at the same time that my then literary agent, Christopher, cold emailed me. And my agent, Christopher, was like, “would you like representation?” Michael was like, “would you write a cookbook?” And I was like, “oh my God, what am I gonna do?” And that’s the beauty of it, you never know where it’s gonna take you. You never know who you’re gonna meet or who you’re gonna talk to. It’s pretty magical that the book came about truly because of a cold email.

Ligori: And it did take you a little longer to finish the full project because you ended on a pie that you wanted to be in the place when you created that pie. And that feels very near and dear to me because I am from Wyoming. So let’s talk about the Wyoming pie.

Fong: So I did the pies in alphabetical order. That kind of was the only way that it made sense to me. Some people have asked me why I didn’t do it in the order the states entered the Union. But I was like, OK, Delaware is first. I was like, I couldn’t ever make sense of that, and I only ever worked on the pies, three pies at a time. That’s how I still think about my life today. Easier to digest. When I got to the last five pies, it was during the pandemic. So I took a break because I didn’t wanna half ass it compared to the rest of them. And I knew that for Wyoming, I wanted to go to Wyoming. I had to bake the last pie in Wyoming. There was nothing going to stop me … well, a pandemic.

It was like [after] two vaccines that I went to Wyoming. And my friends at the time live there in Jackson Hole. I got to bake the pie in their kitchen, eat it with them by a fire, while looking at the Tetons. And it was truly surreal. I couldn’t believe, first of all, that I completed the project. Then I couldn’t believe that I was like sitting in Wyoming, eating elk in a pie and I was done. Well, [not] done because I was working on the cookbook. I’m glad that I had the cookbook, so I didn’t really have to say goodbye to the pies just yet. But yeah, it felt really special to me and it meant a lot for me to be able to finish in Wyoming.

Ligori: I love that. I will say we’ve got about 15, 20 minutes left and I do wanna leave some time for questions. If anyone does have questions, you can start thinking about them now and feel free to just shout them out. I don’t believe we have someone coming around with a mic. So think about that.

I have a question about some of the folks that the pies are dedicated to, because some of them are very close to you and some of them are people you met in an Uber pool.

Fong: Oh Yes, Jane from North Dakota. So I met Jane from North Dakota when I was in LA. I was there for my sister’s wedding. She’s been married now for six years. I just saw her so I should know this. She was married six years ago. I had just landed in LAX, and this is when Uber shares, Lyft pools and everything were a big thing. And this lady looks so lost and it said, like you’re with a co-rider or whatever. I went and talked to her, and I was like, “hey, I think we’re in the same car.” And she’s like, “why are you talking to me?”

When we got in the car together, I was explaining to her how it all worked and everything. And then she was like, “Oh, I live in North Dakota. I’m from North Dakota. I live in Colorado now. When I was little … " We started talking about pie. I don’t really know how we got there, but all good conversations end with pie. I asked her, “what’s your favorite pie to eat?” And she said “sour cream and raisin.” I was like, “uh … " And I’ve since made it and it is the pie for Iowa. It is very delicious. But it’s so wonderful that you get to talk pie to strangers and they leave this lasting impression on you. And I hope that Jane gets the book and I hope in the future I meet her again.

But yeah, that is the beauty of it. It’s like I got to have and spend these tiny moments with these people that left such an impression on me because we talked about pie.

Ligori: I love that. I’m gonna pause, if we have any questions. What’s next?

Fong: So this is so funny. I feel like a common question in America is always “what’s next?” And I do have ideas for what’s next, but I’m really enjoying the pies now. I am just taking my time, sitting with this book, sitting with you guys and enjoying being present in this moment – not really thinking about what’s next.

[Applause]

Ligori: So different cultural pies – how [do] they compare to America and have you considered going international with your recipes?

Fong: That’s so funny you say that because my cookbook team, that I call my “c-oven,” like c dash oven, they really want me to do pies of Bora Bora so that we have to go to Bora Bora. But yeah, there would be so much wonderful pie to explore around the world. Have I thought about it? No.

Ligori: What’s controversial about Minnesota?

Fong: Oh my God. That’s such a loaded question.

Ligori: I know, right? [Laughter]

Fong: So, for the pie, I bake that pie based on who got the pie, which is my old design director, Rebecca. She’s from Minnesota and she would go back for the Minnesota State Fair every year. So I baked a corn dog hot dish pie with savory funnel cakes on top. And because those were her two favorite things from the state fair, we ate it. It was delicious. But yeah, some people think that I should have done like blueberry or something different. I made savory funnel cakes. Yeah.

Ligori: [What was your] family’s reaction to leaving fashion for pie?

Fong: All my dad ever told me to do was to make sure I was nice to people, that I could pay my rent, and that if my friends came over, I fed them. So he really didn’t care, he literally was just like, “you do you.” I am not a doctor, unfortunately, like most of the rest of my family, but I did write a book so … [Laughter and applause]

[Speaking to an audience member] You can’t ask a favorite. That’s not fair, like that’s too crazy. I think I’ll just tell you what my favorite pie is, always. It’s always apple, because even bad apple pie is still good. Like you can warm it up and put ice cream on it, and it’s still wonderful. Apple pie is the pie you marry; cherry pie is the pie you meet on a Friday night. Yeah, it’s always apple. Apple is my favorite

Ligori: In the way, way back. [Listening to a question from the audience]

Fong: We did send a book to Dolly Parton. I don’t know if she got it because you can’t guarantee if she’s gonna see it. She does not have a phone or use email. She only uses fax machine. I do hope that one day I can meet her. I’m truly not sure what I would do. Clearly, I have no trouble speaking, but I’m pretty sure that would be the only time I would be rendered silent. Yeah, it would be amazing.

Oh my God, Illinois was so hard because I was like, it would be so cool if I made a deep dish pumpkin pie. [Laughter] Getting it baked at the right temperature, so that it would bake all the way through, it being so tall and it being a custody filling, yeah, it was, it was a lot. But I did it.

Ligori: That was a big sigh.

Fong: [Answering a question from the audience] I have not baked any pies based on musicals but during the pandemic, I did bake a series of pies based on Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers movies. And Nancy Meyers saw the pie that I baked for the holiday, and I just laid on the ground and screamed. So that pie was based on Christmas fettuccine because that’s what Kate Winslet makes Jack Black when he’s sad in the movie.

So, yeah, that’s the only kind of pop culture pie thing that I’ve done. And it’s mainly because one of my friends was like, “you should bake ‘Lord of the Rings’ pies.” And I was like, I don’t want people to come for me. [Laughter] And I was like, I’m gonna do what I know. And I love rom-coms. I am obsessed with rom-coms and I love Nora Ephron, so much so that my dog’s name is Nora. So I was like, I’m gonna bake pies based on what I know. I baked four pies based on Nora Ephron movies and four pies based on Nancy Meyers movies.

Ligori: One last question – if you could choose one type of pie, not necessarily from your book, but that everyone needs to eat once, what would it be?

Fong: The Atlantic beach pie? It’s a pie that was made in South Carolina as a fix for something that you could eat after eating a heavy seafood meal. Like what dessert comes next? And it’s got a lemony-lime custard filling and it’s in a saltine crust, with either whipped cream or meringue top. And the saltine crust is game changer. I love a little bit of salt and everything. Yeah, if you were to eat a pie once, that’s my recommendation – find yourself in Atlantic beach pie.

Ligori: All right. Thank you so much to Stacey.

[Applause]

Fong: Thank you!

Miller: That’s Stacey Mei Yan Fong, author of “50 pies, 50 states,” talking with OPB’s Crystal Ligori at the Portland Book Festival last year.

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