50 Pies, 50 States: an interview with author Stacey Mei Yan Fong

You might already know I am a massive pie fan, so I am delighted to publish this interview with piemaker extraordinaire and author Stacey Mei Yan Fong.

“I decided to learn about America by creating a pie for each state that said something about its people and included meaningful regional ingredients. I would gift the pie to someone I knew from that state as a token of my affection. Along the way, I would learn state facts that would make me the perfect team member on pub trivia nights. What an adventure: I would learn, bake, eat, and get to share my love for this country with those who made me fall in love with it in the first place,” writes Stacey Mei Yan Fong in the introduction to her first book, 50 Pies, 50 States: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the United States Through Pie.

Born in Singapore in 1988, Stacey moved to Indonesia at the age of three. Aged five, she moved to Hong Kong with her parents, where she attended school until her application to attend Savannah’s College of Art and Design in the state of Georgia was accepted, and she emigrated to the USA. Now living in Brooklyn, Stacey spent a decade designing in the fashion industry. During that time, she launched her "50 Pies 50 States" project, which led to her ‘slinging pies’ at Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Shop. Memories of assembling and baking 300 pies during each Thanksgiving overnight shift remain, but fortunately for us, they have not deterred her from writing this, her first book.

Its recipes thrill me. They are respectful and representative in a quirky and original way. Despite the book's title, the first recipes are inspired by Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Savannah and NYC and form a kind of bedrock or foundational pie text without which the others might never have come into being. And what pies! From Georgia’s Sweet Tea Peach Pie with Pecan Crumble, Maryland’s Blue-Crab Dip Pie with Hot Old Bay Crust, an all-you-can-eat Buffet Pie inspired by Nevada’s Las Vegas, an Alaskan-style pie filled with wild salmon and halibut and topped with mashed potato, Coconut Cream Pie with Upside-Down Pineapple Topping inspired by Hawaii, to Michigan’s Cherry Pie with Cereal Crust and Cereal Crumble, and a pie from Wisconsin filled with cranberries and crowned with fried cheese curds, Stacey gets to the heart of each state.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Stacey via Zoom. Here’s an edited and condensed version of our conversation. Her responses are in bold.

When I first read your blog and then heard that you would be turning it into a book, I thought this book was written for me, specifically.

Oh, I love that. Oh, that really makes my heart sing. That's so nice.

I absolutely adore pie bakers. And people who write about pie. I can think of no higher calling in food.

The most wonderful thing about pie is that it has so many cultural touchpoints across the globe. And it can be savoury or sweet. Growing up in Hong Kong and Singapore, a pie was a very savoury thing to me. We went to the tuckshop after rugby, and I ate a small meat pie. And then moving here to the States, it just changed everything about my perspective of it all.

I'm looking at some of the pies in the first part of your book where you're distilling the earlier part of your life into separate pies; they have to encapsulate so much; for example, your Salty Golden Syrup Pie has an ingredient that is so familiar to British people but for Americans? Not so much.

Oh, completely. I grew up eating golden syrup because it's in a lot of what we call Cha Chaan Tengs in Hong Kong. They're basically like diners. And (on the menu) they've got fried French toast with golden syrup. I was more familiar with that than maple syrup. Maple syrup was more of a novelty. A lot of my childhood was influenced by British things. I grew up in Hong Kong; I was there for the handover. I went through the British school system, did GCSEs, and A levels and like, and so I thought it'd be important when I adapted that recipe (which is)) a very famous and existing recipe called Salty Honey Pie from Four and Twenty Blackbirds where I work. How can I make this my own? And golden syrup? It's one of those things if you know, you know.

What was the emotional process of integrating those things? You talk about growing up, moving to the USA to attend college in Savannah, and realizing that you didn't have a childhood bedroom to return to during your spring or summer break. Developing these pies and drawing together their different threads, did you find it a healing or integrative process?

100%. You know, if you're a person that's moved a lot, it's hard to figure out where your footing is, right? People who go home and sleep in their same childhood bedroom- that's such a privilege. And by doing this, I processed those feelings and understood that home doesn't really necessarily mean a place; it's more of like a mindset, like where you feel most comfortable with yourself, most at ease, like it could be anywhere and honestly, it's mostly who you surround yourself with, right? So you could be anywhere around the world. But if you're with the right group of people you've selected through the years of your life or eating a certain food that triggers a certain memory, that changes everything.

I pick that up very much from the vignettes of people that accompany every single pie.

100%. So the pies are great. And it was super interesting learning all the state facts and stuff. But this book is for those people. It's for those people that made this place my home. And you might read the chapter about Adam and think: ‘Oh, my gosh, I have an Adam in my life’. Everybody has these people. It's just that these are my people. And everybody has relatable stories. And the pies, for me, were a fun way to show someone how much I love them because having grown up in a Chinese household. It's not the most emotional- like I love yous and hugs. But food is how you show someone that you love them, like you ask if they've eaten yet. You're ensuring they're always fed, so the people in my book are a play on that. And also, through lots of self-work on myself, I am learning how to express how I feel about other people in words.

I was incredibly moved by the entry on Montana and how your recipe for a Pasty Pie with Buffalo Stew and Cherry Fillings pie (inspired by the double-ended pasty filled with separate savoury and sweet fillings that arrived in Butte in the late 1800s when miners from England came after the gold. The miners would cast the pie’s crust down the mines as an offering to the pit ghosts and spirits. This reminded you of China's hungry ghosts festival, where food is left as an offering.

While researching, I paid a lot of attention to each state. If I was working on Montana’s pie, I was only working on Montana. I wanted to give each state its own time. And then you start finding these small threads of things that tie everybody together. And that's really all I feel humans are looking for. Yeah. It's fun when it's food. Every state really surprised me with how the world is so similar. Like, I feel like we spent a lot of time over, let's say, four years, talking about how different everybody is, how divisive things are, and how tumultuous everything is. I am not blind to any of that. You know what I mean? I don't feel like this book is like my jaded look at how perfect everything is. It's a different perspective: looking at the doom and gloom all the time really starts to weigh on you. I literally just had this discussion with my roommate, where when we were growing up, there was like the morning news, the evening news, and then the newspaper, right? And those were your only sources of finding out like a war was happening or conflict, whatever. Now we're constantly being bombarded by Twitter and Instagram. We’re being constantly told ‘Everything sucks’.

So I was thinking, you know, I was thinking about the whole sort of squaring politics with a love letter. And you know that's a really tough thing to do, right?

Oh, 100% Yes. It must involve a lot of discipline to avoid going off into a rant.

Yes, my favourite thing to say is that America is my bad boyfriend. You know, there's always that one boy in your life that keeps returning, and you keep forgiving him. You're like, why? But the thing is, for all its faults and all the terrible things you could say about America, people are taking action to ensure it won't be like that in the future. The perfect example I always use is when I was first doing my 50 Pies project. I delivered the Florida pie on the day after Donald Trump was elected. That was one of the saddest days in New York, and also for me at the time, my green card hadn't been approved yet. So I was still on a work visa. Everything was just question marks, right? And I gave the pie to my Florida friends, who were all in tears. They couldn't fathom what the future would be like, but I was, ‘You know what, like, let's talk about positive things that have come out of Florida right now. The three of you, key lime pie, that Florida is the only state with a national park that is basically a coral reef. Like, that's pretty cool. Florida is so close to Cuba that it's basically like a tropical island.’ All these other things to discuss were, ‘Yes, we understand that all this terrible stuff is happening, but sometimes it's nice to have a little levity’.

When I was last in America, I obviously felt great affection and liking for people who had completely different political beliefs to me, and that commonality that I found with them was over food; you'd walk into a restaurant, and there'd be Republican-type signs about guns and freedom everywhere. But the people running the restaurant were welcoming and friendly. (Edit: I acknowledge that I was a white British tourist and, therefore, not subject to some of the discrimination faced by others.)

You need someone to, like, start a conversation, right? Like, I've been to so many small towns in America. And when you look at me, I'm a Chinese girl covered in tattoos. I’m other to them, right? I didn't grow up here. But once you start talking, like you find out, ‘Oh, my gosh, my grandpa also did this growing up’, or ‘Wow, that's so cool’. Like, this also happened. And I feel like that's the beauty of food and how it just sparks conversation. But when you're actually faced with talking to someone or trying to discover something new, people are more open to it than you would think they are. Yeah.

Deep knowledge and research underpin your pie recipes, yet none are obvious choices. Yes, they're very much rooted in state specialities: legends and lore, nature, history, and culture. But they're not obvious. I’m thinking in particular of the pie you developed to represent Maine which is flavoured with Moxie, a drink particular to the state and not something that most English people and quite a few Americans (I imagine) have heard of. Did you feel pressure, as someone who didn’t grow up in the USA, to be really traditional when choosing which pies to showcase for each state? Or did you think, ‘I'm gonna go wild?’

To be honest, I could do whatever I wanted because I didn't grow up here. Yes, this is a cookbook, but really, this is about me figuring it out. Will I ever figure it out completely? Probably not. But this was, like, my journey through pie. And I also feel if it sparks a conversation, where someone says, ‘I actually think that blah, blah, blah (pie), would have been better for me, I'd be like, Why? Please tell me.’ You know what I mean? I feel the freedom of not having been born here. It made the exploration so fun because I got to interpret it the way I wanted. And also, for me, a pie is just a circle, right? Like it's a blank canvas. I can do what I want with it. It can be savoury; it can be sweet, like, pies the limit, right? Who knows what can happen? I wanted to make things that sounded so insane and make things more complicated for myself because I wanted to challenge myself in that way.

I notice that you make a lot of components like Graham crackers yourself. This is advantageous for people not in the USA because, of course, you know, we can't just go out and buy those crackers. So it is really handy to have a recipe!

I wanted the challenge, right? I had never really heard of Graham crackers before I moved here. Growing up in Hong Kong, I think the equivalent would be a digestive biscuit. Back then, I would have never tried to make them. I feel everybody here (USA) would say, ‘Why would I make Graham crackers?’ And so, you know, should I give it a shot? Yes. Will I ever do it again? Probably not. It was the biggest, most long thing ever.

Your spirit of adventure reminds me of Stella Parks, and you’re doing this at a time when the world has closed in. There’s a sense in your book of ‘I’m going to make it really big, regardless.’

Right, exactly. And for me, it’s what I've learned through the process of baking pie and how it has really helped me look at my life differently. You're gonna make mistakes; you're gonna fuck up. And you have to, like, deal with it. And then let it go. You know, if you wallow…. ‘My crust was a little too wet?’ what will you do about it? And if your pie is baked a little too long or too little, just cover it in ice cream. It’s still pie! And I feel like that's kind of the way things are. Everybody takes things so seriously now, and I understand why. But sometimes it helps just to make fun of everything and even make fun of yourself.

Your book has so many different pies; it's hard to single one out. I don't really want to say, ‘This baby's lovelier than that baby’. Which pies, which ones were a particular challenge?

For me, it was New York’s pie. Yeah. It might have been challenging to figure out what to do for Alaska or figure out what to do for South Dakota because it was so foreign to me. But in New York, it was more in the sense of ‘this is my home’. Now. I have lived in the apartment where I've talked to you for 12 years. It's a long time, yeah, the longest place in my entire life I've ever lived in one spot. Because even in Hong Kong, we moved apartments constantly. So this is purely my home. How can I put all of those feelings into a pie? It's such a tall order. So I decided to make 150 Mini pies. And I wanted them to be apple. I knew it had to be. But how can make apple pie special? One of my earliest memories was coming to the States; we came to New York because my dad worked in the hotel business. And we went to the house of one of his friends on the project with him for brunch or something. And a lasting memory is the smell of coffee and an Entenmanns box with a coffee cake. And I remember tasting it and thinking I’d never had a dessert like this. I can't think of a British dessert, Hong Kong or Singapore dessert that has an equivalent. The texture of the crumb was so iconic. And also, Entenmanns was one of the first food delivery services in the city, servicing every borough. When you talk to other people who grew up in New York, they're all like, yeah, Entenmanns on a Sunday: there's always coffee cake around, or there's always doughnuts. So I wanted to translate that feeling into a pie (which became Apple Pie with Coffee Cake Crumble). During the original blog project, I gave pies to my tattoo shop, yoga studio, and favourite provisions store, then threw a huge party. All my friends in the city came together, and I watched them eat these pies. It perfectly encapsulates why I did this project in the first place and why it matters so much. Everybody has this big group of friends. Everybody has a group of friends. It's just like; these are mine. Do you know? Yeah.

That's a long time to live in one place when you've moved around. I can see exactly why your recipe for a New York pie is such a big deal.

Right. And talking to you and other people now that the book is coming out, it feels really wonderful that that sentiment translates. Do you know what I mean? When I was doing the 50 pies project, it was just for my friends until it got picked up, and I got this book deal. All these wonderful things snowballed, and I'm so thankful. But before that, I was just doing it to do it. I wasn't making any money off of it. And I'm glad that it translates to other people where they're ‘like, whoa, like, I also feel these feelings for someone, or I feel these feelings about where I live’, and what more could you want?

Do you feel now that you've made America your home, you found a sense of home within yourself?

I think so. Yeah. And I feel like that's underlined and highlighted because my gift to myself when I turned in my manuscript was I adopted a dog. And now that I have my own dog named Nora Ephron, of course. I feel so strongly that this is where I'm supposed to be.

Have you made a pie for your dog?

Not yet. Not yet. I will when her one-year adoption birthday comes around.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Nora Ephron’s pie will be!

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You’ll need a set of American cup measures to make these pies.

Find Stacey on Instagram here.

Order 50 Pies, 50 States here.