When Sara Foster was growing up in Tennessee, Sunday lunches meant two things: gathering around the dining room table in her granny Foster’s kitchen and homemade pie.

Over the last two decades, Foster has earned a loyal following at Foster’s Market, her Durham market and cafe where she makes and serves the same kind of homey, scratch-made dishes she grew up eating. And that includes pie; they get year-round top billing, but especially this time of year. The day before Thanksgiving is Foster’s Market’s busiest day, when they sell hundreds of pies, including flavors such as apple sour cream, key lime, and chocolate chess.

Foster is happy to bake pies for others, but with her newest book Pie, which was released in September as part of UNC Press’s Savor the South series, Foster wants to spread the pie gospel by sharing her favorite recipes, memories, and tips and tricks.

Foster firmly believes that there’s a reason for the saying “easy as pie,” but perhaps no pie exemplifies this more than chess pie, a Southern pie made with a simple custard filling of sugar, butter, eggs, milk, and cornmeal, with classic versions including buttermilk, vinegar, lemon, or chocolate.

Foster spoke to INDY Week about her love of pie and how chess pie really is the easiest pie ever. She doesn’t scoff at premade crust, but her recipe for Everyday Flaky Piecrust makes the case for trying your hand at homemade crust; either way, Granny Foster’s Chess Pie is all that separates you from pie novice to pro (find both recipes at www.indyweek.com).

If you want to learn more about Pie or have pie-making questions, stop by Foster’s upcoming book events on November 11 at 12:00 p.m. at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh or November 17 at 2:00 p.m. at McIntyre’s Books at Fearrington Village in Pittsboro.

Pie, For Me

As told to Layla Khoury-Hanold

Even before the open-kitchen concept was really popular, granny Foster’s kitchen was always an open-kitchen concept. She had a big dining room table in her kitchen (she had a huge kitchen), and that was just kind of the scene where we all gathered, whether cooking, eating, or talking. That was her dining room.

Granny Foster made one of two things for Sunday lunch: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and, depending on the season, if it were summer, we’d have something like creamed corn or green beans from the garden. Her other typical Sunday lunch was pot roast. With pot roast, she’d do the typical potatoes and carrots around the pot roast, and then we would have the same kind of thing on the side, green beans or squash casserole or sliced tomatoes; in summer, it might be fried okra or peas out of the garden. We all participated in some way, whether it was setting the table, getting things out of the garden, peeling fruit, or cracking the eggs.

There was always pie for dessert. Often it was a chess pie, mainly because she would have those ingredients in her pantry. That was also my sister and mom’s favorite pie growing up (my dad and I loved chocolate meringue), so we always had that pie at Sunday lunch and on every holiday table.

Chess pie was also a Southern favorite from early on. Because of the amount of sugar these pies contain, they could be kept in a pie chest before there was refrigeration, and they traveled well. There are many stories about the origin of the name for the chess pie. Some say the name “chest pie” is said to have been shortened with the Southern dialect to “chess pie.” Others say the name came from “It’s just pie,” changing to “chess pie” as it was misunderstood with the slurring of the words.

I think, too, it has become such a classic pie because it’s one of those things where you always have everything on hand to make it, so it becomes easy for people to make. There’s not a lot of cutting, peeling, dicing, or, as with other custard pies, making the custard and getting it to the right consistency. Chess pie is just mixing the ingredients in a bowl and putting it in a pie shell and baking it, so you can put it together in ten or fifteen minutes.

The other great thing about chess pie is that it can easily take on other flavors, like vanilla, brown sugar, buttermilk, chocolate, lemon juice, or a little extra nutmeg. In mine, I add cardamom, which I love with buttermilk. At Foster’s Market, we do a lemon chess pie, and we drop pieces of fruit in it like raspberries or strawberries, so you occasionally get a bite of fruit.

Chess pie brings back a lot of memories for me, but I also love it just for the simplicity of its flavors. It’s just so good and so rich and so simple in its own right.

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