The other day I received an email about something I’ve just been dying to know more about – pie. It seems that a large hotel chain decided that pie would be the perfect touch to make guests feel more at home away from home and they hired a company to do an annual survey. After all, what could possibly be more comforting than a pie in the restaurant oven, or a cinnamon scented lobby?

In order to make the survey more interesting, they came up they came up with the creative idea of asking what kind of pie people like. To no one’s surprise, apple pie is still the all-time favorite of those surveyed. I looked eagerly for my personal favorite, but found berry pie is at the bottom of the list. Blackberry pie is apparently one of the big losers and didn’t get a mention. After all the blackberries I’ve picked while fighting chiggers and briars for every berry too.

One of the “runner-up” pies was chocolate. I always thought the second most favorite was cherry. Didn’t you? Things have apparently really changed since George Washington’s days. To try and explain chocolate’s popularity, the survey said chocolate pie is considered romantic. So, next year look for Cupid to arrive with a chocolate pie in your face.

Other than apple pie and chocolate, people in the survey favored pecan. That’s just nuts, if you’ll pardon the expression. What about good old coconut cream like my grandmother used to make? Just show me a southerner that doesn’t love coconut cream pie and I’ll show you a Yankee!

The survey says that 30% of women feel they bake a better pie than their mother or grandmother. People actually bake pies? Who wants to heat up the kitchen in the summer baking pies? I think we should leave pie baking to the bakeries, myself. I can do enough smoke damage to my kitchen just trying to brown a frozen one.

The trouble with making homemade pie is this horrible substance involved that is called pastry. Pastry is made from a combination of flour, shortening, and liquid. Notice the resemblance to children’s play dough. The filling, on the other hand, is incidental and can be almost anything, fruit, nuts, pudding or even something as unsavory as rhubarb. I do not understand why pastry has to be what makes a pie a pie.

Anyhow, if you stay at the hotel, you will not have to make pie. They will give you free pie and room service pie afterwards. Obviously, the price of the room is incidental as long as we don’t have to bake. I’m not sure where the hotel gets their “award-winning” pies but probably they have a pastry chef who speaks French and makes children’s play dough at home in his spare time.

In case you are wondering, I really have nothing against the number two, pecan pie. We have many pecan trees in the south, so it doesn’t cost a fortune for nuts as it would if you had to buy pecans at the store. However, you will have to crack them and pick them out of the shell without getting the bitter part in the nuts. We also have a pie in the south called chess pie, which is sort of like a pecan pie without any pecans. After picking nuts one time, you will know why it is popular.

After re establishing that apple pie is the all time America favorite, the survey went weird with details we would rather not know, like how many men eat pie in their underwear and what percentage of people eat pie in bed, or with their hands. Are they worried about the extra laundry?

My dilemma now is that I just keep wondering how many of the respondents to the survey filled it out in their underwear?

Copyright 2006 Sheila Moss