In Praise of the Gas Station Pie

Read Sarah Perry's James Beard-nominated piece from Humble Pie

Cake eaters,

This year marked a new milestone for the magazine: Our first nomination for a James Beard Media Award, for Sarah Perry’s Humble Pie essay, “In Praise of the Gas Station Pie.” The MFK Fischer Distinguished Writing Award ultimately went to Hannah Drier, for her article, The Kids on the Night Shift, an incredibly deserving piece of journalism covering the child migrant labor crisis. We’re so proud of Sarah’s nomination, and excited to share her article in this newsletter below.

And luckily, we have another editorial first to share! Padma Lakshmi selected Felicity Spector’s Tough Cookie story, “From Blackout to Bakhmut,” to be included in The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024. The anthology, which co-edited by Padma and Jaya Saxena, is available for preorder now.

Our summer issue, Candy Land, is officially off the press and making its way to our distributor stateside, so we’ll be sharing information on how to preorder and other exciting updates soon. In the meantime, read on for Sarah’s piece, plus some more cake ephemera.

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In Praise of the Gas Station Pie

When I was little, my mother let me eat any kind of sugar I wanted. I took down chewy Chips Ahoy! by the row, scattered golden Werther’s Original wrappers all over my bed while spending long afternoons reading, and slathered Toaster Strudels with gooey white frosting to the tune of the Star Search theme song, cleaning out the plastic sleeve by laying it on my tongue and sucking. My teeth cracked the B-grade ganache on Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes with the slow deliberation of Amélie tackling a creme brûlée, and I washed it all down with rivers of neon Orange Crush.

The best snack, though, was a Hostess cherry pie from the gas station. Mom loved to go on drives, and on the weekends, we’d wind our way down the leafy back roads of our Maine county, headed nowhere in particular, singing along to classic rock over the ribbony sound of air rushing through our open windows. At some point, we’d stop at a little gas station to fill up. Mom would get a bottle of sparkling water and maybe some pretzels—she didn’t share my sweet tooth, which kept her thinner than I could dream of becoming. I would go straight for that Hostess cherry pie, which I would eat in the melted summer sunlight, vacuuming whole cherries into my mouth and licking viscous red from my fingers as we sang along to Tom Petty. She’s a good girl, loves her mama.

My mother had grown up poor, the youngest in a troubled family of ten siblings, and married and then divorced my father, who was too much like her own, when she was very young. She raised me alone on factory wages. She levied regular bedtimes, made sure I did my homework, and kept the house surgically clean so we wouldn’t feel poor, even when money was scarce. Din- ners were served promptly at 6 p.m. every night: Shake ’N Bake chicken with canned green beans, the occasional Crock-Pot chuck roast surrounded by root vegetables, mini pizzas on English muffins with Hormel pepperoni slices. Snacks were a fun, pleasurable thing she was able to provide in abundance, and aimless drives were our most silly and joyous form of free entertainment.

In our small town—or on our side of it, anyway—we weren’t much concerned with the dangers of excess sugar. We weren’t watching documentaries about inflam- mation and the collusion between major food manufacturers and the government. If you didn’t have diabetes and you weren’t too fat (Mom insisted I wasn’t, although nineties diet culture would come to viciously contradict her), it was kind of ridic- ulous and self-important to worry about what you ate. And Mom’s satisfaction as she watched me enjoy sweets always increased my cravings—sometimes I ate mostly because I wanted to see her smile. Sugar was a kind of happiness we could give each other, and it was never out of reach.

Which is why I’m ashamed and saddened to admit that over the past few years, I’ve desperately been trying to eat less sugar. After a lifetime of gloriously unbri- dled candy and confection consumption, I made the mistake of taking a month off sugar in 2020. I slept better. My skin finally cleared up. Despite the heaviness of the world, the weight of my depression lightened, became easier to carry. The evidence was circumstantial but overwhelming: it would do me good to cut back. I’d long considered myself some kind of sugar warrior—each time I gave myself this pleasure I was resisting the fallacy that unimpeachable dietary choices could yield perfect health, as though there were such a thing. Now I was humbled and confused by my own desire for balance. Since then, I’ve spent most days in an exhausting dance between abstinence and indulgence: When should I make choices to preserve my health and emotional stability, and when should I just give myself what I really want? My mother died when I was twelve, and so I do not have her simple meals to return to; if I were to conform fully to a doctrine of sensible nutrition, I would, in some deep way, be leaving our short, shared life behind.

So I was both anxious and grateful when, recently, my partner showed up with an Arbuckle Mountain Fried Pie. He had driven from Tulsa—where we’d lived together until I moved for a new job six months ago—to my new home just outside of Dallas. We are still learning new ways to love across the distance. Friends had alerted him to these large, crescent-shaped, deep-fried hand pies, which sit at Exit 50 on I-35 on the Oklahoma side, almost exactly halfway through the four-hour trip. They cost $3.75, and the shop that sells them looks like a barn, fronted by two gas pumps under an overhang topped by a model dinosaur—the sort of faded kitsch that recalls the heyday of Route 66.

From a couple dozen flavors, he had selected, as is right and good, cherry. Apple is their most popular, but he knew better: I hate apple pie. It’s so irritatingly hege- monic—Americana, white picket fences, little boys-will-be-boys stealing women’s labor from windowsills. Apple pie is a two-parent nuclear family, 2.5 kids, golden retriever: part of the set dressing for a nationalist hallucination of better days. It gets little mileage from its sugar, obnoxiously faux-virtuous without being that tasty. Cherry pie, on the other hand, is excess, indulgence, glowing red folded into supple layers. Cherry pie doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t need to dress up in whipped-cream frills. Every bite is a combat-boot kick to the molar. Cherry pie belongs at a gas station on a highway, sticking her thumb out.

I slid the dense bundle from its white paper wrapper, laid it on a cookie sheet, and turned on my tiny oven. I’d been eating ascetically, and didn’t really want this treat, but I resolved to perform enjoyment. Sometimes love, I told myself, is about accepting what’s given to you. As the apartment slowly filled with buttery heat, I wondered if this item might be overkill, even for me. Did a pie need to be fried? Wasn’t a pie pie enough?

I’ve spent about half my life in various Southern states—North Carolina, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas. When I’m living up North, I cringe at lazy cracks about how Southerners eat, how they fry things one could never imagine frying: pickles, Oreos, Twinkies. People exclaim and giggle, as they might after leaving a freak show. The implication is that “they” don’t know better—that we, the Northern elite, are better, smarter, more enlightened. These moments hurt me, partly, because I don’t know where I stand. Am I implicated in this cruelty, or is the cruelty aimed at me? This judgment was the worst, it pains me to say, in New York City, where I lived the longest and where my heart still resides.

But this culinary derision wasn’t actually a New York thing. Nor was it really about North vs. South. This was about class (and, of course, race). My humble Maine upbringing was proof enough, but it became more obvious when I left graduate housing in posh upper Manhattan and moved out to Crown Heights, a historically working-class, Jewish and Black neighborhood. That first week, I discovered that my local grocery store was full of the foods of my childhood. I was suddenly surrounded by so many products I’d last seen in the 1990s, before I went to college and started climbing into another life. Those Hostess pies were available at every corner bodega, Stove Top was easy to find, and I pulled Steak-umms from the freezer in a state of rapturous nostalgia. The Met Food on my block even had my mother’s Caress soap, which I had forgotten about entirely. The first full day I was there, I bought a bar and showered with it, lathering away the salt of moving, scrubbing grit from the soles of my feet, then sat down at my hand-me-down dining table in a towel I’d used to wrap my dishes and ate a Hostess cherry pie in the sharply perfumed aroma rising from my skin. I was an interloper, a white gentrifier in a predominantly Black neighborhood, but in that moment, I felt a full-body belonging, away from the abundant wealth uptown.

Of course, my move to a less expensive neighborhood could not protect me from food shame. In that Brooklyn apartment, I had one sisterly roommate who laughed in shock when she saw how much butter I used on my toast; she was the sort of person who always left exactly two bites on her plate to indicate her genteel satisfaction, the conclusion of her orderly, polite desire. Another friend was appalled when I took out a cereal bowl for the ice cream I’d offered to share, finally accepting only a teacup’s worth of what I had to give, lest it endanger her slender limbs, her pure, unclogged heart. Sometimes, I revealed myself with no help from my dining partner, like the time a graduate school professor took me out to a white-tablecloth dinner on the Upper East Side to celebrate my impending graduation, and, I, sud- denly nervous, mispronounced the item I desired, ordering not “steak au poivre” (pepper steak) but “steak au pauvre” (poor man’s steak). When it arrived, I could barely taste it, replaying on a loop the waiter’s indulgent, pitying expression as he set it down.

Meanwhile, the Hostess cherry pie of my youth disappeared. Shortly after I moved to Brooklyn, the company went bankrupt, and although the conglomerate who bought the brand a year later managed to perfectly reboot Twinkies, the pies have been terrible ever since, a cardboard shell half-filled with dry, strangely salty pinkish paste.

Like other formerly poor kids, I have passed, and I have changed. I have eaten langoustines in Portugal atop cliffs overlooking water a hundred shades of blue; squid sashimi in Seattle so fresh the tentacles waved, the salty soy sauce conduct- ing remaining electric life. Each time I eat a neat wedge of tiramisu, I slot it into a lifetime ranking of all the others I’ve forked slowly into my mouth. I grew from a child who had never seen an avocado to a person who enjoys slowly pulling apart a baked artichoke, and I know enough, at least, to order that poverty steak medium rare.

And yet, despite my growing tendency toward apparently healthier, more elevated eating, it’s the foods that others consider trash that still please me most. Eating them, I can leave behind this “I” who should know better, this “I” who remains silent while others laugh.

My partner, who very rarely eats sugar and stocks the cabinets with powdered supplements and healthy oils for his smoothies, nevertheless understands me. As my little apartment in Texas gradually filled with the scent of molten cherries, he looked eagerly into my face, anticipating my happiness just as my mother might, if she were still on this earth.

My phone timer chirruped, interrupting our excited reunion chatter. I grabbed my cat-shaped potholder and pulled out the pie, now even more golden, like a live thing warmed in the sun. My desire for it, too, had warmed. I lay it on a meadow-green Fiestaware plate, part of a large, new set given to us by his generous parents, where it looked ready for a Bon Appétit spread. The pie’s belly had weakened and leaked, so I had to get a fork, which felt a bit wrong for a hand pie, but then I sank my teeth into that first piece, a firm corner devoid of filling, and I was ten years old again, tearing greasy bites of doughboy off a white paper plate at the county fair. I could see again the smoke rising from the food trucks and feel workhorses stamping the packed earth in their stalls. I thought I might throw some powdered sugar on top next time. The next bite brought me to the main event: the filling was admirably slippery, only slightly gooey, and the cherries popped pleasingly in my teeth, releasing their slight sourness amid the wave of liquid sugar. It was like a Hostess cherry pie from heaven, and three times larger. I worked through it slowly, prolonging the pleasant buzz in my head, my body becoming looser and looser, as a body does in its first moments back home. My love watched me from his perch on the counter, perfectly satisfied. Yes, my friends, the pie needed to be fried.

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Sarah Perry, author of Sweet Nothings (2024), a collection of essays on candy and desire, teaches at the University of North Texas, where her favorite reward for a round of grading is a pie pulled from her fully stocked freezer.

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Watch: Our friend Adi Sambu-Balde is competing on the new season of Great British Bake Off: The Professionals! We’re cheering her on.

Attend: An intimate writers’ cafe and wine bar for queer writers of color in LA next Wednesday, June 19.

Support: Noona’s Ice Cream, maker of our favorite black sesame ice cream, is fundraising for their very own brick-and-mortar shop in NYC.

Attend: A queer cake sitting event in London on June 27.