Diner Pies

There is something nostalgic about American diner pies, even though I grew up in East Sussex. I think it comes from the films I watched when I was growing up. I remember when a broke Kenickie asks Rizzo if she’s got a couple of quarters so that they can split an eskimo pie in the diner in Grease and then orders an eskimo pie and a knife from the waitress Viola. I made my father-in-law a strawberry chiffon pie for Father’s Day. My friend, Tracey, had given me a huge bag of homegrown strawberries.

I made my Dad a lemon chiffon pie for Father’s Day. Chiffon pies have a light filling, usually cooked and firmed up with gelatine (I used Vege-Gel which is suitable for vegetarians and vegans), then aerated by folding in beaten egg whites.

I then tried baking a peanut butter chocolate banana bacon pie. It has a base layer of bananas followed by a layer of chopped bacon stirred in to melted chocolate and peanut butter finished with a custard topping and garnished with finely sliced bacon and caramel curls. The adjective I am going to use to describe this pie is unpleasant. My husband, when asked, said the pie had “unusual flavours” which is a polite way of saying it was not nice. Individually I adore all the ingredients in this dessert but by putting them all together it ruined all of them. The remains are sitting in my fridge, untouched (even by the strapping young men who are my sons who usually go through the food in our house like a biblical plague of locusts).