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023: Emily Hilliard: How Pie and Folklore Mix

April 8, 2015 by Gabriel

Emily Hilliard of Nothing in the House on The Dinner Special podcast on How Pie and Folklore Mix
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Emily Hilliard of Nothing in the House on The Dinner Special podcast on How Pie and Folklore Mix

Nothing in the House

Today we are talking about pies. Emily’s Nothing in the House is a pie blog and a finalist in The Kitchn’s 2014 Best Baking and Sweets Blog Homies Awards. Emily’s writing and media work has been featured on NPR, PBS Food, and American Food Roots, just to mention a few. And her interests in food folklore, history, and music is a recipe that makes her blog awesome.

I am so excited to have Emily Hilliard of Nothing in the House here on the show today.

On the Idea Behind Her Blog:

This was actually about ten years ago now; I’m sort of aging myself. But it was the summer after I graduated college and my friends and I, a lot of women friends, were finding these berry trees and bushes all over Ann Harbor where we went to school. We started getting into pie making and I never really made a pie before. My mother was always sort of the pie maker in the family.

It sort of became this social pursuit. We would get together and bake pies and have friends over and eat on the porch. And then that summer, I got a job in Vermont. When I moved my friend Margaret, who was sort of a partner in crime, she suggested that we start this blog so we could stay in touch through the pies that we were making. So I really just started not necessarily for the public, and just as a thing between friends, and as I made more friends in Vermont, they started contributing.

It’s sort of evolved from there and at this point I’ve been the sole writer for a few years now but I still like to pull in other contributors and friends and bakers. But that’s really how it got going. I never really set out to have a blog necessarily, a food blog. But it’s kind of grown with me as I’ve developed different interests.

On Naming Her Blog “Nothing in the House”:

When we started the blog, I was developing an interest in folklore, which I later went on to study in grad school. But I was reading a book. I think it was called The Study of American Folklore. And in it, it was talking about Depression Era pies. So pies that were made with little ingredients or whatever was around. And those are things like mock apple pies, which are made with crackers. Or green tomato pies or chess pies, which often use vinegar, which was kind of a replacement for lemon. And another name for that other than desperation pies is “nothing in the house” pies. So Margaret and I thought that was a cool name. So it became Nothing in the House.

On Her Inspirations:

Well, there’s a lot. I guess in the food world and folklore world, I would definitely say my professor and thesis advisor, Marcie Cohen Ferris. She’s written a great book recently called The Edible South, about the history of southern food. Ronni Lundy, who’s another food writer. She has a book coming out, Sorghum’s Savor. Molly O’Neill, a great food writer who used to write for the Times.

Then in writing, I don’t know. I can list so many names right now, but I think I really look to women creatives who have been working in the fields that I’m interested in for a long time and really put the time in. I really feel like I am looking to my elders. Not that they’re old but these women who have put in a lot of work and done some really profound things.

I’ve brought pies to classes with Marcie and I was working for Molly a few summers ago and made some pies up there. Sometimes it’s a little intimidating. But it’s also sort of… I see baking as a type of gift or sharing.

I remember making a North Carolina peanut pie for Marcie. This was for a graduate seminar class and I think I also made some sort of nothing in the house pie, I think it was a vinegar pie, for a big lecture I was in of hers. At Molly’s, I think I made a peach pie because it was summertime in upstate New York.

Tips on Making a Pie Crust from Scratch:

For the crust, one of the key things is to keep everything cold. I don’t really keep my dry ingredients, like flour and salt, cold but definitely you want to keep your butter or whatever fat you’re using; maybe you’re being adventurous and using lard. But you definitely want to keep that cold because those butter chunks won’t disintegrate and will add to the flakiness.

Also, another thing I would say is it’s really hard to roll out a pie crust when it’s hot out. So maybe make sure if you’re trying a pie crust for the first time, don’t do it in the heat of summer if you don’t have air conditioning because it can stick to the surface.

Another thing I would say is sometimes you will think that you need to knead the crust but really you want to work it as little as possible because it’s that thing with the butter. You don’t want to melt the butter because then it will be tough and you won’t have the flakiness that you really want in a good crust.

On How to Make Cooking More Fun:

Lately I’ve been getting a CSA or a farm share and that’s really nice because I’m not necessarily someone who can just go to the store and have an idea. But when I have a set framework of like, “Alright, I have onions and broccoli and potatoes and I have to do something with that.” So I think that adds sort of a limiting factor so you don’t have to start from scratch.

Another thing I like is I really like cooking with other people, and that’s always been present in my life with family. I’ve taught at this program where communal cooking is a big part of it and just having friends over and cooking together. And I also like having music or the radio on while I cook.

On Her Book “PIE. A Hand Drawn Almanac”:

Elizabeth is a local illustrator in DC and I’ve admired her work. And I noticed that she had some food drawings and one of them was a tart illustration. And so I contacted her a few years ago and asked her if I could post about it on my blog. We started emailing and had the idea of collaborating.

So we got together a few times and had a few ideas and the book kind of stuck. I basically had all these seasonal recipes all ready so I drew from the blog; I gave her the text and she went to town and just pulled out images and things from the text.

We self-published it and printed it and it was great. We got some great press for it and we’re thinking about either reprinting or doing maybe a savory version. We worked together a lot and we have some other ideas we might follow up on. Maybe pie related or maybe not. This holiday season we made some pie tea towels together.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I have been interested in A Chef’s Life and I’ve heard some great things.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

Well, definitely American Food Roots. That was started by a group of four women who are all established journalists and it’s great. It explores food traditions all over the country.

Another one would be the Southern Foodways Alliance. They explore traditional food ways all across the south.

Biscuits and Such is a great southern food blog.

There’s so many to name. Witchin’ in the Kitchen, Jess Schreibstein’s blog. That’s food and sort of delves into herbalism and such, too. I could go on and on.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

Well, on Instagram I would say those women, Jess, and Elena. And Yossy Arefi of Apartment 2B baking. She’s just a beautiful photographer. She takes just stunning photos of food and baked goods.

And also Tara Jensen. I think her handle on Instagram is Bakerhands. She’s a bread baker and pie baker, wood fired. She lives in Marshall, North Carolina. She’s also a great photographer and artist. She brings a lot of art into her baked goods with her stencils and decorated crusts.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

Well, I think one thing I use a lot is my Tupperware rolling mat. Not that it has to be Tupperware but it’s one of those old, vintage Tupperware mats that is just so helpful for biscuits, pie crust, anything you’re rolling out to keep things from sticking to the counter.

You don’t have to wash down the counter all the time. And I’ll even travel with mine.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Salt is maybe too easy. Maybe I’ll say butter.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Well, one that just came out by a great pie maker on the west coast is Kate Lebo’s Pie School. She’s a really brilliant writer and pie baker and so it really comes together in the book.

I would also say Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. It’s not really in the pie realm but all fermented foods, pickles and vinegars and everything. That’s been a big inspiration.

The River Cottage Preserves book is really great for jams and pickles. It has some traditional recipes like beech leaf tincture. Sort of these older recipes.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Wow. There’s so many to choose from. Well, I’m just going to go with the thing I can see on my record shelf right now. The Silly Sisters album with June Tabor and Maddie Prior. It’s a bunch of old English songs, but it’s just a favorite and I often have it on while making food.

Keep Posted on Emily:

Definitely follow the blog, nothinginthehouse.com. And yeah, I’m pretty much on Facebook. Instagram as TheHousePie and Twitter, Housepie. So whatever is your fancy for social media I suppose you can find me there.

Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: A Chef's Life, American Food Roots, Apartment 2B baking, Bakerhands, Emily Hilliard, folklore, Food Blog, Food Blogger, June Tabor, Kate Lebo, Maddie Prior, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Molly O'Neill, Nothing in the House, NPR, PBS Food, Pie, pie crust, Pie School, PIE. A Hand Drawn Almanac, Ronni Lundy, Sandor Katz, Sorghum's Savor, souther cuisine, Southern Food, Southern Foodways Alliance, Tara Jensen, The Edible South, The Kitchn, The Kitchn's 2014 Best Baking and Sweets Blog Homies Awards, The River Cottage Preserves, The Silly Sisters, The Study of American Folklore, Wild Fermentation, Witchin' in the Kitchen, Yossy Arefi

004: Elena Rosemond-Hoerr: How Southern Food Stands Out From Other Cuisines

February 23, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping posted with her.
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Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast on How Southern Food Stands Out From Other Cuisines

Biscuits and Such

On her blog, Elena shares her love of southern cuisine and southern culture, and apart from the amazing recipes, you'll find gems such as her Cast Iron Chronicles, which is a series that documents the restoration of a seriously rusted cast iron pan.

She co-authored a cookbook called The American Cookbook: A Fresh Take on Classic Recipes, contributed recipes to The Meat Cookbook, and has a new book coming out in April called The No Time To Cook! Book, which you can preorder.

I am so delighted to have Elena Rosemond-Hoerr from Biscuits and Such here on the show today.

On Missing Home:

Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talks about missing home.

I graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art which is an art school in 2008. I graduated right at the beginning of the recession which meant that I took a job that I didn't really want just to sort of float along. I was living in D.C. with my then fiancé, who's now my husband, and the apartment was decorated with all of his stuff which meant swords and dragons.

I was so out of place and I felt so homesick.

I just kept telling myself that if I could only make food that reminded me of home, I would feel better and it would be the way to get myself through this stretch.

I really wanted to make my grandmother's country-style steak, but I couldn't remember the whole recipe and I was a little dodgy on it. So I looked online because food blogs were starting to become a thing and I felt like I might be able to find some resources and there were no southern food blogs.

It was just a total lack of availability; there was nothing representative of the south online.

So I was complaining about it to Dan, my husband, and he was like, 'Well, you could just do it.' I was like, 'Oh, yeah, that's a good point.'

So I have a degree in photography, that's my background, and he is a web developer. So we put together Biscuits and Such and the first post, which was Country-Style Steak went up in October of 2008.

I have gone back and updated a lot of the photos and a lot of old posts. But, I have left the photos on that post because they are horrible and since they're so bad I think it's nice to look back sometimes and see how far I've come.

It's a good indicator of how much the blog and I have progressed over the past six years.

On Cooking:

Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talks about cooking.

My family is very passionate about cooking, all sides.

My mother is from New Jersey and her mother is very Sicilian and her father is very Irish; both families are recent immigrants and food is the way that they give love and the way that they nurture each other.

My father's family is very, very southern and on that side, also, food is how you comfort. You bring food to friends and relatives and families; potlucks for funerals, potlucks for weddings. It's the way that we nurture each other. So I grew up in a family where even through a lot of passionate fighting, the way that we connected and the way that we communicated was around the dinner table.

So I'm definitely not a chef. I learned from my parents and my grandparents and from experimenting. But food is something I've always been very passionate about.

I cook for my family pretty frequently. When I first started the blog, the person I was thinking of most was my grandmother, my father's mother, Barbara. We just spent a ton of time together throughout my childhood and my teenage years.

She cooked with me a lot and both of my parents were not super keen on having us in the kitchen when we were growing up because it got in the way of the productive things. But my grandmother would let me make JELL-O with her and let me dabble with her. It's really where I learned how to experiment.

I do love cooking for my family, now. My dad and I cook together all the time and it's really nice to talk to them about food and to feed them and to share traditions. Especially because what I focused the blog on is our southern food culture. So I really had a great opportunity to connect with my family about our family food traditions and foods that they grew up eating, and that they still love, and that I grew up eating and that I still love. That's been really nice.

On Southern Cuisine:

Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talks about southern cuisine.

The thing that stands out about this so much, to be both in southern cuisine and southern culture, is just the sense of warmth and a sense of community. I feel so loved everywhere I go in the south. The grocery store, my vet, the parents at the school where I teach. Everyone is just loving, and friendly, and welcoming, and warm and that's one of the things that I missed the most when I was outside the south.

Southern food is kind of the same way. It's home food, it's comfort food. It's not overly experimental or fancy. It's just good, quality ingredients made with care and that is something that I think is really special.

It definitely has its roots in sort of frugal, simple, farm-based, agricultural-based communities. They didn't have a lot of many things, but what they had was the time and energy to put into the ingredients and to really cook with quality and care.

On Being Fearless in The Kitchen:

Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talks about being fearless in the kitchen.

I was definitely always fearless.

It’s a really important quality, especially during recipe development.

I learned a lot of techniques, both with my parents and grandparents and through trial and error, just by sort of seeing what would happen if I combined these ingredients or if I tried this method.

I drew a lot of inspiration from watching them and from cooking with them. But a lot of my progression has just been through seeing what would happen and a lot of times failing and being cool with that.

On Kitchen Disasters:

Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talks about her kitchen disasters.

The first Thanksgiving after Dan and I started dating, we had his sister, her husband and their then two-year-old daughter, our niece Meredith, over for dinner. It was the first time that I'd ever cooked for them.

There was a lot of pressure because I had just started this blog and I bought a pumpkin to make a pumpkin pie. I was super excited to make it from the pumpkin and to do it from scratch. I made it and I was so proud. It had taken me hours.

Meredith and I whipped the cream together and we put it out. She took a bite and she started to bawl.

I was like, 'What happened?'

Then, I tasted it. I realized that in my excitement, I had forgotten to put spices in the pumpkin pie and sugar in the whipped cream. Two super essential ingredients. Pumpkins don't really taste like anything without the pumpkin pie spices. You need those. It was awful, it was so awful, I was so embarrassed.

The next year for her birthday, I made Meredith a chocolate mousse pie and she said it was 'pony magical.' That's about the highest praise a three-year-old will give you.

On Co-authoring – The American Cookbook: A Fresh Take on Classic Recipes

Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talking about co-authoring a cook book.

I got a call last June from someone at DK, which is a publisher based in London. They have U.S. and international publications and they're part of Random House.

They said that they had been interested in doing a cookbook about American cuisine, but that the author that had pitched the idea was from London. They didn't think it was a great idea for an English author to fly solo writing an American cookbook, so, they were looking for an American author to work with her.

I was super interested and it turned out that Caroline, my co-author, lives in Durham, which is about two hours away from where I live and is where I'm from. I drove up to meet her and we just really hit it off. We spent the day coming up with a list of all the recipes and dividing it up.

Then I spent about three and a half, four weeks cooking, writing recipes and cooking like crazy. The whole book was cooked and tested and re-cooked and written in about three and half, four weeks.

It was a really cool experience for me.

I had obviously been writing recipes and developing recipes for the blog for a number of years, but it was my first experience writing for a book where there are standards for how the recipes need to be written. It's UK-based, so I had to measure and weigh everything because it's the metric system which I am not familiar with.

There was this huge learning curve which was really challenging and also really fun. I'm very fortunate that my first cookbook was in such a wonderful environment where I had Caroline holding my hand and the editors holding my hand and everyone sort of showing me the ropes.

I'm very fortunate that since the American cookbook, DK has asked me to come back and work with them on two additional projects. So I did The Meat Cookbook and then we just wrapped on The No Time to Cook! Book, which has been fun.

The Meat Cookbook came out this past September so it's available. It's 300 recipes and so much more. It's a really great, solid cookbook and I contributed 50 recipes to that book.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

None. We don't have cable.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

Nothing in the House is one of my favorite ones. Not Without Salt is great. Those are probably my two favorites.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

Instagram is great. I follow a ton of food bloggers but then also, a lot of lifestyle bloggers. One of my favorites is Hey Natalie Jean.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

Red pepper flakes.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Red pepper flakes.

I love them because they add a really subtle heat. They add a nice undertone of spice that isn't overpowering and that you can use in any dish.

I put them in everything.

You never notice that they're there, but they add just a really rich and subtle heat, which I think is important in pretty much all savory dishes.

What are a few cookbooks that have made your life better?

I just bought Not Without Salt's new date night book, Date Night In.

I love her blog and I love that 'Dating My Husband' series, so I'm really excited to dig into that one.

When I was first learning how to cook, my husband bought me Tom Colicchio's Think Like a Chef. It's amazing because it teaches you processes, not recipes, which I think is so important, especially when you're first starting out.

Ratio is another one that's similar that's really great.

That teaches you how to make things… like the ratios for making cookies, the ratios for making cakes. The sort of standard recipes for all of these things that you can then adapt to your own needs.

That is absolutely what made me the recipe developer that I am now. I have a foundational understanding of how to make different kinds of dishes.

Keep Posted on Elena:

Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping posted with her.

The blog is called Biscuits and Such. It's BiscuitsAndSuch.com. I am on Twitter and Instagram as @ElenaBrent. On Facebook as Biscuits and Such.

So you can find me and follow the blog and see new posts and updates on all of those places.

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    Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Biscuits and Such, Cast Iron Chronicles, Cookbook Author, Country-style steak, Date Night In, Elena Rosemond-Hoerr, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Hey Natalie Jean, Jell-O, Maryland Institute College of Art, Not Without Salt, Nothing in the House, Ratio, Southern Cuisine, Southern Food, The American Cookbook: A Fresh Take on Classic Recipes, The Meat Cookbook, The No Time To Cook! Book, Think Like a Chef, Tom Colicchio

    Hello! I'm Gabriel Soh, home cook, food enthusiast and your host of The Dinner Special podcast.
    Everything here on The Dinner Special is an experiment, just like with cooking. Thank you for listening and being part of the adventure.

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