“When I saw the movie, I said, ‘that’s our chocolate pie,’” says Miriam Juban about her reaction to an all-important pie in the movie, The Help, a story that reveals the complexities between African-American domestic workers and their white employers in Mississippi in the 60s. Juban and business partner Tanya Dillon of the pie company Delight Thyself with Feliciana Delights specialize in southern pies, available Thursdays and Saturdays at the Red Stick Farmer Market in Baton Rouge. Sitting in a dark theater watching the film unfold, Juban says she recognized the type of chocolate pie featured. Emblematic southern dishes figure big in the plot, none more so than the chocolate pie for which a maid named Minny is locally famous. (It helps the movie deliver a memorable ending). In its original, untainted form, Minny’s chocolate pie is a classic rendition reliant on a key ingredient. “I knew it when I saw it from its color and texture that it was made with cocoa,” says Juban. Indeed, as Juban and I spoke this week and she speculated on the pie’s composition, I dislodged the August 2011 issue of Food & Wine from a pile of papers on my desk where the recipe for Minny’s Chocolate Pie is part of a larger article on the movie’s dishes. She was right about the cocoa powder.
As for Delight Thyself with Feliciana Delights, chocolate pie comes in three-inch tarts or nine-inch pies. The team also sells lemon, coconut, and pecan, and seasonally, Key lime, orange and chocolate pecan. They produce savory pies, too, with fillings like chicken and dumplings, shrimp and eggplant and crawfish.
Among dessert pies, Juban says chocolate will always be a mainstay.
