Kathleen Collins
89
There’s No Such Thing as Crack Pie Babies Kathleen Collins I love my New Yorker. Its presence regularly confirms my comfortable and cozy status as a member of the cultural intelligentsia. Never mind that I barely have time to complete my cartoon reading, much less begin an article, before the next issue comes hurtling toward me. Around this past Thanksgiving, though, I enjoyed unhurried communing with the Food Issue. So much time, in fact, that I even leisurely perused the lovely, transporting advertisements, like the two-page spread for cookbook publisher Clarkson Potter featuring Ina Garten, Bobby Flay and Martha Stewart amid elegant tableaux of wine, cheese, roasted poultry, a flower arrangement, and a four-layer Red Velvet cake. Included in this spread, however, was something that initially struck me as more Onion-y than New Yorker-y. “Want to serve up satisfying comfort?” read the teaser. The text offered a suggestion to “follow [Ina Garten’s stilton and walnut crackers] with celebrated dessert chef Christina Tosi’s appropriately named crack pie, a staple of the New York sensation Momofuku Milk Bar so addictive your guests will never get enough.” The rest might well have said, “Offer your posh guests a new stimulant for dessert! They’ll love it so much they’re sure to come knocking at your door at all hours in various states of dress, coherence and paranoia begging for just one more bite!” I assume you know from crack pie – if not on a carnal level, then on a water-cooler conversation level. If, however, you don’t live in one of the hard hit urban areas or have just emerged from a cocoon, crack pie is the invention of Christina Tosi who made it for a staff meal at WD-50. As it happens, both crack concoctions (cocaine and pie) began fortuitously, not unlike the creation myths of the Toll House cookie or the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Real crack came about when it was discovered that everyday baking soda could be used in place of ether to process cocaine, and crack pie was born when Tosi wanted to make chess pie but didn’t have the right ingredients. The concept of pie, bursting with American-ness and inclusiveness, is nothing if not honest and simple – and, paradoxically, crack pie really