Bubby’s Homemade Pies

At first, “Bubby” sounds like a nickname for someone’s grandmother or great-grandmother, but perhaps to readers from NYC, the name will immediately spark thoughts of delicious, homemade pies because Bubby’s is a New York institution for pie. Bubby’s Homemade Pies is their cookbook and, while it sounds (and actually looks) like something that grandma “Bubby” might have put together, it offers more recipes for pie than several baking grandmothers could put together.

As all great pies do, the book starts out with recipes for crust. There are 15 of them, including butter and lard pastry crusts to cookie crumb crusts to savory flavored crusts. The traditional butter and lard-type crusts are all purpose pie crusts that can work with almost any filling, while the other crusts work better when paired with specific flavors. The instructions for putting together these crusts are excellent and, as a nice touch, the authors include recipes for the cookies (graham crackers, gingersnaps and chocolate wafers) that are usually used in the sweet crumb crusts so that there is no need to rely on store-bought cookies.

There are almost too many fillings to count and the pie recipes are broken down by category to make it a bit easier to sort through all of them. Just to name a few, the recipes include Fried Cherry Pies, Fig and Prosciutto Pie, Mocha Pecan Pie and Lofty Coconut Cloud Pie. This is not the kind of book that you will get through quickly because there is just so much variety! The recipes are generally short and clearly written. The only drawback is that there aren’t any photos; there are some nice illustrations, instead. It gives the book a homey, old-fashioned feel, but I still like a couple of nice food shots to inspire me to get in the kitchen.