American Thanksgiving is coming up, and of course I'm excited. It's my favorite holiday, and has been for years. I have a couple of aunts in Florida, and it's become a tradition that we stay with one aunt and make pies there, then have Thanksgiving at the house of another aunt. I'm excited, of course. I'm also thinking about Thanksgiving pie.
Apple, pumpkin, and pecan pies are of course traditional. Several years back my brother decided to make a Tollhouse cookie pie, and not to be outdone, I met him with a key lime pie. A few years after that, I started doing a black-bottomed key lime pie, which is basically a normal key-lime pie recipe from the back of the bottle, except with a ganache on the bottom and double the filling (since my aunt only has 10" pie pans). I really want to do cherry pie, but my my mother insists that six pies (my brother makes two Tollhouse pies because they're always the most popular) is enough for ~30 people.
I'm not sure why we continue to make pumpkin pie. It is nobody's favorite pie, and it's always the last pie to be finished off. I'd much rather have a cherry pie. (Cherry and key lime pie are my favorite pies, and together with cheesecake my favorite non-chocolate deserts. Which didn't stop me from adding chocolate to my key lime pies.)
As for pecan pie, my brother's tried new recipes for a few years, until he finally found one with bourbon that he loves. I think pecan pie and pralines are the only legitimate uses for pecans. Also I now live in Texas, where pecan trees are used as landscaping. They're gorgeous until their nuts drop. Then suddenly it's like the streets are paved with ball-bearings.
Also, people have different opinions on apple pie. Mine is that nutmeg, ginger, and allspice are as essential as cinnamon, that cinnamon should be true cinnamon rather than cassia, the crust should be a mixture of butter and leaf lard (though I don't do that at Thanksgiving because of vegetarians in the family) and that the best apples for pie are Northern Spy, hands down. You'll notice that this is quite different from Maddox's take, but then he's Armenian and I am to Turks what otaku are to the Japanese.
Also, I've decided to create a poll. Suggest your own options, multiple votes and revotes are allowed, and when I have a respectable number of options I'll add a "fuck pie. cake or death," option.