NC Pie Series: What comes at the end is always remembered: the goodnight kiss, the famous last words, the three-point shot at the buzzer, the homemade pie following a fine meal. What’s a plate of flounder in Calabash or oysters on the Outer Banks without a slice of lemon meringue, served on a Styrofoam plate with a plastic fork? Can you imagine a rib eye at the Angus Barn in Raleigh without the grand finale — that famous chocolate chess, drizzled with syrup, dolloped with whipped cream? What of the perfectly fried chicken at Mama Dip’s in Chapel Hill, culminating with a slice of sweet potato or pecan? Sure, we love our cakes, cobblers, and banana puddings, but pie provides the sweetest memories.
“The Jarrett House was the first North Carolina restaurant I ever ate in,” Karen Barker remembers. Like the Jarrett House itself, she and her husband, Ben, are culinary legends around here — for their iconic, award-winning restaurant, The Magnolia Grill, which lived in Durham from 1986 to 2012. Years before that, when Ben was a student at Western Carolina University, he worked at the Jarrett House as a server, Karen says, and ate a slice of vinegar pie “every shift he worked.”
The cozy inn was a fixture amid the mountains in Dillsboro for more than a century — it opened in 1884 and just recently closed — and the vinegar pie was arguably its most famous offering. This old-school, Southern dessert is a classic “desperation” or “make-do” or “pantry” pie. In other words, a recipe that relies on kitchen staples versus seasonal, perishable ingredients. Instead of using apples, say, use apple cider vinegar. And instead of using buttermilk, use a lot of melted butter. The result is as humble as it is addictive.
Jarrett House
100 Haywood Road
Dillsboro, NC 28575
(828) 586-0265
jarretthouse.com
1 stick margarine, melted and cooled
1½ cups sugar
1 tablespoon flour
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
3 eggs
1 (9-inch) pie shell, unbaked
Combine the first six ingredients and pour into the unbaked pie shell. Bake at 300º for 45 minutes.
North Carolina Pie Series: Lemon Milk Pie
Whether you’re using it to add a familiar tang to your pound cake or to marinate fried chicken, buttermilk is a Southerner’s secret ingredient.
In the early 1970s, a fortuitous partnership between one of North Carolina’s iconic industries and a financially strapped NASCAR saved stock car racing and spawned a sports institution.
Inside a modest white farmhouse in the rolling hills of Rutherford County, an extended family with deep ties to the Lake Lure community cooks up homestyle Southern feasts for the faithful.
Deep in the remote Three Sisters Swamp of the Black River stands an ancient old-growth forest. For decades, a famed bald cypress, dated to 372 AD and known as Methuselah, was its patriarch — until two even older trees were discovered.
