Pie: A Love Story
When I started the business of pie in the fall of 2021, I did it for love.
At the time, I loved a man and making him pie was a complete joy. It started on his birthday with a Key lime pie, his favorite. It was the best he’d ever had, he said. “There’s a market for this,” he said.
All that love led to pies for my family, friends, and eventually all of you. The more pies I made, the more surreal the experience. I didn’t grow up baking. I was a typical 70s latch-key kid and a child of divorce who grew up in Texas until the age of 16 when I moved to the East Coast. Weekends with my dad and stepmom in Houston, summers on the Texas border with my grandmother, the rest of the time with my young, single, immigrant mother.
My abue & me in her kitchen, circa 1975.
No one in my world baked, but my Mexican grandmother (I called her abue, a diminutive of abuelita), was a woman whose love language was food before anyone knew anything about love languages. Huevos rancheros, sopa de arroz, frijoles and flautas. Caldo de pollo served with tortillas de maíz she doctored up with a fresh squeeze of lime and a little salt, just the way I liked. Agua de limón she lovingly prepared with limes from the tree in the backyard. I can still see the swirl of sugar and lime segments and seeds, hear the clink of the metal spoon against the glass as she stirred and smiled, taste the first sip of cool juice on my tongue. The flavors of my childhood—sweet and salty and citrusy and spicy—come from her kitchen and they’ve made their way into many of the pies we make and sell today.
Prior to 2021, I had made only a few pies, always with store-bought dough, never completely from scratch. I was married for a time and my then-husband and I once made a lemon meringue pie on an electric stove in the house we rented in suburban Maryland. Another time, I made a blueberry pie for our two young sons. These were one-offs. I wasn’t a baker. I was a young mother and a wife.
But after the break-up of a marriage, you learn things. And, when I fell in love again, I learned the hell out of how to make pie. Though the relationship ended a few years after that OG Key lime pie, it sparked a new love story that’s still unfolding…
Stay tuned to read about how I started a pie business without having any clue about how to start a pie business.