Sue Anne Zollinger was starstruck. “Look, there’s Phyllis Bartholomew,” she said to her friend Susan. Bartholomew, a 60-year-old woman from Columbus, Nebraska, was the amateur winner of last year’s National Pie Championship, and she was walking across a convention room at the Radisson WorldGate Resort in Kissimmee, Florida. This was Zollinger’s first visit to the Great American Pie Festival, an annual event put on by the American Pie Council, but she wasn’t there to compete. Zollinger, a scholar and specialist in pie-culture arcana who lives in Indiana, had rented a booth at the festival’s outdoor expo in nearby Celebration to promote her Web site, the Pie of the Month Club (pieofthemonth.org).
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Back when Zollinger was studying at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute in the early 90s her interest in pie was ordinary–she just liked a slice every now and again. But in the stifling summer of 1993 she began spending evenings at the Harold Washington Library Center, basking in the air-conditioning. She stumbled upon a cookbook that featured the favorite recipes of U.S. presidents. “I can’t remember which one was into Transparent Pie, but it seemed so wacky,” she says. “I found enough strange pie recipes that I started feeling that there was some underlying Americana cultural thing that I found really interesting and that I thought my friends would also find interesting.” She began jotting some of the more peculiar recipes and historical lore down in a notebook. “I would sit on a stool in the cookbook aisle and open up indexes and read pie recipes. I started making xeroxes of any weird pie recipe,” she says.
That fall Zollinger began designing postcards that featured a recipe on one side and an original illustration on the other. She’d duplicate them at Copy Max in Wicker Park and send them out to about 50 of her friends. She prominently labeled the first card with “Pie of the Month Club,” but given her busy school schedule it took her nearly two years to produce the first dozen. After that she stopped, but then “everyone pitched a big fit because they liked them,” she says. “I was burnt-out, so I worked on getting guest artists for a year, but they were even worse at getting them done on time than I was.”
But oddly enough, baking pies has remained a minor activity for Zollinger. Although at first she planned on taking a stab at every recipe she sent out, she was soon relying on her friends to do it. “I think the grossest pie I had was Prune Butterscotch Orange Nut Pie–it was disgusting,” she says. “But some of the ones that seem gross are pretty good–Sauerkraut Pie isn’t bad, as long as you distribute [the sauerkraut] evenly through the custard.” Early on Zollinger had ambitions of compiling the various recipes and art in a cookbook. But she wants to finish her dissertation first. She hopes to get her degree next May.
