Arkansas food historian Kat Robinson wrote about the process and what she ate during 10-16 hour baking days at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs. The Writers’ Colony is hosting a pie talk with Robinson Saturday, Feb. 18. RSVP here.
I’m currently working on my twelfth book, The Great Arkansas Pie Book, which should debut at the Arkansas Pie Festival on April 29. To accomplish this, I’ve been reaching out to my friends in the restaurant industry for recipes, while also delving into hundreds of Arkansas community, club and church cookbooks, seeking the pies that have shaped our state’s sweet tooth. For those cookbook pies, I’ve curated a number of recipes to research and redact and perfect so the reader can also replicate these rare and relevant pies. That means baking a whole lot.
There’s no better place for me to head than The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow for this pursuit – which is exactly what I did the day after Christmas. The Writers’ Colony is the beautiful gift of Crescent Dragonwagon and her late husband, Ned Shank. It offers a home-away-from-home for writers of all ilk to get away from their usual hustle-and-bustle to concentrate on their projects and enjoy the beauty of Eureka Springs. Each of the suites — three in the original Dairy Hollow House (once home to Dragonwagon’s esteemed restaurant) and five in the 505, a Usonian home refurbished for writers next door — includes a bedroom, writing room and private bath, along with refrigerators and coffeemakers. Five nights a week, the marvelous Chef Jana Jones creates a European-inspired dinner for the writers in-residency; provisions are also available for writers to feed themselves for other meals.
Then there is the Culinary Suite, the only culinary writer-purposed suite in all of North America, maybe even the world. It’s a bedroom, living/dining area, bathroom and kitchen meant just for cookbook writers and other culinary authors. It is… well, I’ve lived in apartments smaller than this suite. The cavernous kitchen is equipped with a massive refrigerator, double ovens, six-burner gas range, microwave, KitchenAid standing mixer and just about every tool you need to create any dish. I’ve added some pieces of my own (gadgets, utensils, pans and the like) over the course of my many stays. This is where I spent 12 days in July 2021, cooking and photographing the 103 dishes in “Arkansas Cookery: Retro Recipes from The Natural State,” my eleventh book.
I am a longstanding alumna of Writers’ Colony, way back to my days of writing Eat Arkansas in 2010. Because of this long relationship (and because I practically begged for the time), I was allowed to begin my residency during the time the facility is closed over the holiday break. This meant when I arrived the entire place was silent and still. I loaded dozens of boxes of pie-making provisions and equipment into the suite, set up my kitchen and got sleep before beginning the process of creating all these pies the next day. I was awakened to what sounded like stomping outside at daybreak — which turned out to be a pair of does rustling the leaves for nibbles in the cold grass. It was just above freezing.
For the next several days, I worked 10-16 hours each day, making and sometimes remaking pie after pie after pie. Breakfast each day was the same — black pour-over coffee and two almost undercooked scrambled eggs with black pepper. Besides my two cups of black coffee each day, I enjoyed whichever hot tea I was craving at the time (sometimes Red Dragon Chai, sometimes lemon ginger, sometimes spearmint and often cardamom) and grapefruit flavored seltzer water.
While I adore Eureka Springs and its bevy of restaurants, I was in work mode, concentrating on my work, reading through one cookbook after another, cross-referencing with appropriate historic cookbooks of the time period of each restaurant and choosing which recipe to tackle next in-between rolling dough, patting cracker crumbs into pie pans, melting chocolate in a double boiler, stewing mincemeat and washing so many dishes. Sometimes this meant I was up at 4 a.m. and other times it meant I thought about going to bed around that time. It’s like cramming for a final, where time loses all meaning as one falls into a subject deeply.
I subsisted on a variety of items, such as a quick fry-up of sliced baby bella mushrooms with Worcestershire sauce, a little onion and garlic, and Pecorino-Romano cheese. There were a lot of single bananas consumed, oranges, pears and apples, and bites of corned beef, whatever could be unconsciously grazed while concentrating on stirring a custard or beating up a meringue.
And then there was the chicken. Y’all, chicken. See, I knew I’d be attempting multiple chicken pies during this retreat, so I stopped in at Chicken Mart in Russellville, the original location on South Arkansas, which I have been visiting since my college days. If you’re trying to stretch a dollar, there are few places to find a better deal on chicken than here. I figured I’d debone my own poultry and got a 20 pound box of assorted parts for $21.99 … and then noticed that an additional box would be $5 more. So yeah, I got that 40 pounds of chicken, not knowing if I had wings or thighs or breasts or backs or what.
So while I’m making pies and reading about pie and adjusting ratios of ingredients for recipes, I’m also roasting copious amounts of chicken — like, a pan was always in the oven the first three days. I’d season most of the birds with just salt and pepper, but left about 10 pounds to use for recipes where there were very specific instructions for how to cook the chicken — which, every time, EVERY TIME! — was by boiling, thank you so much, 1950s cooks. I’d boil them with mirepoix, I’d boil them with carrot tops and celery stalks, with just onions, with … so many things, and so many parts.
Because, you see, when you get the 20 pound box of chicken from Chicken Mart, it could be anything. And for me this time, that included torsos with a single wing, split thighs, double breasts, single drumettes, you name it — backs, fronts, sides, whatever. The reason Chicken Mart can sell these boxes so cheap is because they’re off cuts that don’t go in the measured bags you get in the store. They eat, but man, some of them look WEIRD.
And when you’ve spent 40 hours straight with two naps working on the first dozen pies, all sweet pies, two eggs and coffee and maybe a pear because you’ve got tunnel vision getting all this stuff together … there comes a moment, when you decided this most recent pan of chicken needed more than just salt and pepper so you shook on a little thyme and sage and parsley and it comes out of the oven and you put it down and take off the mitts and suddenly the urge to eat overcomes everything so you grab a thigh with your fingertips and try not to singe yourself too badly as you chew into the side and grimace as the hot fat dribbles down your chin.
I mean, it wasn’t the only time I found myself eating over a hot pan of meat. Hart’s (Eureka Springs’ hometown grocery store) had a special on a pack of beef ribs day after I got there, when I went looking for extracts (which Hart’s has ALL of, it’s so very well stocked). I realize when I get back I have no barbecue sauce or rub with me, but throw them in a pan and shake on cumin, paprika, black pepper and brown sugar and stick them in the bottom oven at 200 degrees and just forget about them until it’s past midnight and I’ve just finished shooting another pie on the dining room table and if I don’t get protein I will just die, and I am guessing those ribs had sat in there five hours or so but they were so very, very fall-apart soft and juicy!
I actually only ate out twice that week — that Thursday night at Ermilio’s Italian Restaurant, where I sat in my vehicle with the windows down for about an hour while I waited for my table. There’s always a wait at Ermilio’s, and I am OK with that, because it’s so very good. it’s also very close to Writers’ Colony, so I don’t feel too guilty about leaving for just a wee bit. The temperature, which was so cold on the way up that I had milk crystals form in the milk in the back end of my vehicle on the way up, was balmy, in the 60s, and the chatter of folks was nice. I got my table beside the kitchen door and dove into meatballs in Mama’s thick marinara over fettuccine noodles with a drizzle of alfredo sauce, oh golly that’s just good, eating half and taking the rest to go because those portions are just way too big for me these days.
Kat Robinson
The other day was New Year’s Day. I’d ended up not bringing black eyed peas to soak and enjoy, and considering how rough 2022 was for me, I was needing all the luck I could get. I knew Local Flavor Café would hook me up, and they did, with vegetarian black eyed peas complimentary. I splurged with a Filet Benedict, a petit filet atop eggs Benedict, with coffee and the most excellent view of the deck and Main Street, a moment to breathe and relax in the middle of my pie-making extravaganza.
Kat Robinson
By this point, I was six days and 18 completed pies into my work. There were so many that just … didn’t work, not at all. There was a peppermint foam pie that I could never quite get right, a pumpkin custard that ran like a waterfall, a fudge pie like a brick. This is why the work at Writers’ Colony is so important. Many of these recipes were published in cookbooks assembled before I was born. Finding the individuals who crafted the originals is mostly moot, and fixing the measurements to work for modern tastes and package sizes. Cream cheese used to come in three ounce packages and now comes in eight ounce bricks. Coconut used to come in cans instead of bags. And chickens … well, a whole chicken in 1957 averaged 905 grams, or roughly two pounds, while in 2008 that average bird was up to 4202 grams, or over nine pounds, something to consider when you’re recreating the chicken pie Liza Ashley would bring to Gov. Orval Faubus’s table. Everything has to be adjusted, from spicing to the number of cups of boned chicken to substitute for a whole boiled bird.
Kat RobinsonThe pies, they kept a-comin’ – goody pie, dang good pie, chess pie. I made a darling version of the lemon chess pie reported to be Bill Clinton’s favorite, and a pretty passable version of Franke’s cinnamon cream pie, though the latter needs another run so I can figure out the layer I see in my original photos from the restaurant taken a dozen years ago.
Kat RobinsonI worked a couple of nights on mincemeat, trying to match the flavor of my grandmother’s pear mincemeat without the extraordinary measurements left to me from her canning batches. There were experiments with canned rhubarb and cornmeal and mushrooms — no, not all in the same pie — and silent screaming matches at pastry that didn’t evenly set in the pan while I blind baked.
And that week, each night, I stopped at 5:30, took off my apron, changed my shirt, washed my hands and face and went downstairs with pies in hand to stock the communal fridge — because no sane person should have 30 pies at a time in a room with them when they’re by themselves. Most of the pies I made at Writers’ Colony went to the refrigerators in the main kitchen and the 505, or the countertops. I’d drop off the pies and sit down for one of Jana’s marvelous dinners, sharing stories with the other writers who were there on residencies, talking about Arkansas and the area and hearing what they had to say about their writing efforts and the differences between here and home.
Kat Robinson
This trip I spent roughly two weeks at Writers’ Colony, and I came out of it with an even 50 recipes for the new book — 50 pies I researched, cooked up and photographed in the makeshift studio I set up on the Culinary Suite’s dining room table. I’m getting ready to return for another two week sojourn — but this time, it’s different. You see, it’s time to share more of what’s going on with this new book, and the love of pie, with folks. So on February 18, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow is hosting a special event where I’m going to talk about pie, share a bit of video from my 2018 documentary “Make Room for Pie,” and offer a chance to try some of the sweet and savory pies from my upcoming book. It’ll happen 2-4 p.m. in the main room at the facility, with tickets on sale now for $45. If you’re planning to escape to Eureka Springs for a slightly post-Valentine’s Day retreat, it’ll be an excellent addition to your, um, activities.
So, the short answer to the original question (what did I eat in Eureka Springs) is … well, it depends on the writer. I can tell you I took a bite of every single pie I made, sometimes reluctantly, to ensure I was creating good eating. That meant on some days when I was taking photos of finished pies, I ate 18 bites of pie, which I worked out to be about three slices. And other days, my diet was black coffee, two eggs, a pear and a chicken thigh. Haute cuisine it is not, but if the crazy work I did researching “Another Slice of Arkansas Pie“ in 2018 didn’t convince anyone I’d go to almost any lengths to make sure I had the absolute best collection of photographs and stories for a book, I don’t know what would.
