BLACK BOTTOM PIE

Instead of or as well as Pumpkin

It is wondrous how a man focuses his mind when he is being flogged.

Said Jonathan Swift, Irish author of Gulliver’s Travels and several other satirical texts pillaring contemporary social behaviors. As you read, your mind goes off in one direction and then is yanked back by the word “flogged,” it being the last one, or near to it, that you expect to read. 

You would expect something to do with sex, food or religion.

So let’s stick to food, since floggin’ can hardly be held PC even in the most forward cultures. 

I believe that people who eat fats are happy. Fats have been brought together in many wonderful ways, but hardly ever so happily as in BLACK BOTTOM PIE.

In the superb Cross Creek Cookery by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, better known as author of The Yearling. In the first chapter, “To Our Bodies’ Good,” she tells of a letter from a young aviator cadet who said that Cross Creek “should be banned in or near any encampment” of the armed forces “in order to preserve discipline.” Because the…