"Arkansas Pie: A Delicious Slice of the Natural State" by Kat Robinson

I ntroduction (and rice with just sugar and butter to boot). Our state produces fabulous cheese straws, funnel cake mix, yellow corn grits and muscadine wine.

We like our pies—oh heavens we do—but we prefer them meringued or creamed or with a little coconut in them. We also love our burgers, having an almost unreasonable number of burger offerings around these parts.

Our cultural food oddity is the Reuben sandwich, found on about 90 percent of non-ethnic menus here and traced back to the first days of Oaklawn Racing Park in Hot Springs. We’re used to picking blackberry seeds from between our teeth in summer and enjoying our Arkansas Black apples in the winter.

If you really do have any questions about Arkansas, its food, its culture and cuisine, drop me a line at kat@tiedyetravels.com. I stand behind this answer 100 percent.

I had, at the time, just completed a quick article for Serious Eats entitled “The 15 Best Pies in Arkansas.” I wrote my editors there and bitterly complained. I also complained to fellow Arkansans and mentioned to my boss at the Arkansas Times, Max Brantley, that I knew a lot about pie in Arkansas and had never heard of this jelly pie.

I didn’t realize then that pie was about to become a significant part of my life.

At the time, I was writing “Eat Arkansas,” the blog for food lovers for the Arkansas Times. I was also writing “Tie Dye Travels,” my own travel blog that had taken off and grown Internet-style wings. I had my Serious Eats cred and my Lonely Planet cred and was contributing to whomever wanted to pick up my stuff, be it Times competitor Sync Weekly (though not on food) or Food Network Magazine or Arkansas Wild. I was traveling a lot too.

I’d started up an “Eat Arkansas” feature called “Pieday,” where each week I’d share a pie from around the state and talk about where it was from. The groundwork had been set. I found myself scanning menus and questioning waitresses over desserts. I always had my camera out, and I took notes on anything that came on a crust.

Around June that year, Max asked me to start working on my next cover piece, a Thanksgiving week piece on…you guessed it, pie. My other two cover stories (on Arkansas food gifts and the best breakfasts in the state) had also appeared in this spot on the calendar in previous years, and I knew the sort of research I’d have to undertake.

But it wasn’t that easy. I suppose in some states a restaurant might be like as not to have pie. Here in Arkansas, we love pie. We love its infinite 16