WHOOPIE PIE CAKE IN MAINE

Like ice tea, lemon icebox pie is a passion where the weather gets oppressively hot. A cool wedge of this velvety indulgence seems especially right after smoky barbecue or spicy fried chicken. The best lemon icebox pie on the planet is served at The Silver Skillet, a mid-20th-century blue-collar diner in Atlanta. It is thick and smooth as alabaster, just barely tart, both rich and refreshing. Supplies are extremely limited—sometimes just one pie is made a day, often gobbled up midmorning by breakfast-eaters who enjoy it after a meal of country ham and red-eye gravy.

The Cottage of La Jolla is a quintessential California dining experience: bright and breezy, with a kitchen repertoire that sings of local produce and light-touch cooking. It is best known for warm breakfast pastries and homemade granola, but dessert-lovers know it for unbelievably rich raspberry white chocolate bread pudding (made with pound cake rather than bread) and banana nut cake with caramel frosting. The latter is moist, dense and devastating—proprietor Laura Wolfe says, “I confess to liking it so much that I have on occasion taken the last piece and hidden it for myself!”

Many excellent banana puddings throughout the South use ’Nilla Wafers as part of the formula. The wafers add great texture, some pieces staying firm, others turning into moist streaks of cookie that swirl through the custard. At the Loveless Cafe, a beacon of country cooking west of Nashville since the 1950s, pastry chef Alisa Huntsman makes the best possible version using homemade vanilla wafers. “Those things in the box are cute,” she tells us, “. . . if you’re 4 years old. But they taste too artificial for me.” Fresh-made custard is veined with her featherweight cookies, along with sliced ripe bananas.

CHERRY PIE IN MICHIGAN

Northern Michigan is one of America’s great pie lodes. Apples, blueberries and cherries are harvested in abundance, and the tradition of turning them into delicious pies is strong. The Grand Traverse Pie Country, a big bakery with a handful of tables, makes some 30 varieties, including berry-cherry, peach-strawberry and autumn harvest pecan. The best of them all is cherry pie, which performs a magnificent balancing act that teeters sweet and tart inside a fine, flaky crust that wants to shatter into savory shards as soon as it’s poked with the tines of an eager fork.

The Whoopie Pie is the dessert of choice all along the Downeast shores. Invented in Maine in the 1920s, it resembles a huge, squishy Oreo cookie—two disks of sticky chocolate cake sandwiching a white cream filling. Good whoopie pies are found up and down the coast in restaurants and lobster shacks, but Becky’s has its own twist: whoopie pie cake. It’s a layered affair with marshmallow-soft icing and old-fashioned devil’s-food character that evokes dessert time at a child’s birthday party. Forking into a tall, tender wedge is a special pleasure because of the ambience of Becky’s, a friendly wharfside diner where fishermen and dock workers sit side by side with blue-collar folk, all here to enjoy an honest meal at a fair price.
—Jane and Michael Stern

Interview With a Chef

Born and raised in the heart of North Carolina barbecue country, Elizabeth Karmel—the creator of
GirlsattheGrill.com and author of
Taming the Flame: Secrets of Hot-and-Quick Grilling and Low-and-Slow BBQ—started a firestorm among barbecue purists by singing the praises of gas grills and urging women to pour on the coals. “For me, starting Girls at the Grill wasn’t about pushing him out of the way, it was about joining in the fun,” she says. Heading into fall and winter, when it’s so much easier to strike up the grill than to start some coals, Karmel defends her point of view.

SKY: Say what!?
ELIZABETH KARMEL: I’ve conducted lots of informal, blind taste tests, and here’s the interesting thing that happens.
People always choose the food that was cooked on the gas grill as the one that tastes better, but they say it was cooked over charcoal. So in our world, where perception is everything, charcoal tastes better. But the reality is that people choose the taste of food cooked over a gas grill.
SKY: C’mon, how can that be?
EK: The grilled flavor comes from the fats and juices that drip down from the food and are instantly vaporized by whatever is hot underneath the food. Now that could be gray-ash charcoal, that could be flavorizer bars or that could be ceramic briquets. Both gas and charcoal grills give food that distinctive flavor.
SKY: Some tips, please, since 75 percent of us have converted to gas?
EK: You always want to preheat a gas grill. That’s something a lot of people don’t do, but need to.

Use the lid of the gas or charcoal grill, especially when cooking indirectly. You can’t barbecue or grill indirectly unless the grill is covered. Food that takes longer than 20 minutes to cook is better cooked indirectly by convective heat, the heat that circulates around the food.

Keep your grill clean, which means cleaning it after each and every cookout while the grates are still hot. Use some elbow grease and brush the grates with a brass bristle brush. Do this and it will never be a big job.

A good grill is like a cast-iron skillet—you want it to get seasoned so it will turn coal black. Once it is seasoned, the food won’t stick.

Oil the food, not the grate. And use a basting brush [www.cheftools.com/affiliates/grillfriends] and some sauce—that will ensure the food is juicy and not dried out.
—David Bailey