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Rachel Pennington is a great baker, a shitty capitalist, and a memoir/food writer. She owned The Pie Chest in Charlottesville, VA, a sanctuary of comfort, delicious food, and rest for the weary soul. Her culinary work has been featured in or mentioned on The Travel Channel, USA Today, the Boston Globe, Edible Blue Ridge, Southern Living, Our Local Commons, the Southern Foodways Alliance, the Edacious Podcast, and various local publications. Her buttermilk biscuit was featured at Flavored Nation as the state dish of Virginia. Rachel’s writing has been featured in Passages Literary Magazine (Ashland University Press), Forty Voices, The Porch, and she was longlisted for Craft’s Hybrid Writing Contest in 2023.
Rachel graduated with a Doctorate in the Creative Writing and Public Theology Program at Pittsburgh Seminary this past Spring.
She resides in Crozet, Virginia.
Publications
The Porch - A Slow Conversation About Beautiful and Difficult Things
CRAFT Magazine 2023 Summer Hybrid Contest - Best of the Longlist
“The Names Have Been Changed To Indict the Guilty”
Medium.com@publictheologian
“When I Started This Essay It Was Before the 2020 Election”
“Grace (or, put better, Charis)”
My Mani-feast-o
“My Mani-feast-o: A Menu-oir” is a memoir told in the form of a 13 course meal from aperitivo to digestivo, including recipes at the end of each chapter. I’m currently going through the query process to find an agent and/or publisher.
The Invitation
You are cordially invited to attend the terroir and harvest of one particular life.
My own.
It will be my honor to have you along for this night of delicious food and remembrance.
Dress:
Come as you are.
It doesn’t matter what you wear as long as you are here.
(Yes, that is a Martha & the Vandellas reference.)
RSVP:
Regrets only, please.
Courses:
Aperitif & Amuse-Bouches
Heirloom Tomato, Rosemary, Lemon Zest Puff Pastry Bite
w/ Olive Oil Drizzle
Appetizer
Fig & Cherry Crispy Candied Bacon on
Creamy Pimento Cheese Farina
Cheese
Mini Savory Goat Cheese Cake on Ritz Cracker Crust w/
Balsamic Roasted Peach & Mint
Palate Cleanser
A poem
Bread
Bread Basket:
Honey Cornbread & Mini Buttermilk Biscuits, w/ Granny Smith Apple Butter, Shenandoah Valley Sorghum Butter, Pimiento Cheese, & Hot Pepper Jelly
Subtlety
A clever, absurd, short story
Soup
Roasted Chicken and Buttermilk Dumplings in Savory Roux w/ Herbs
Intermezzo
Lemon-Kissed Thyme Shortbread Cube
Main
Heirloom & Vidalia Onion Tomato Pie w/ Simple Green Salad
Entrement
A picture
Dessert
Honey-Nut Chocolate Chip Cookies -or- Sans Nuts
Mignardise
A Single Sugar-Encrusted Strawberry
soaked in Appalachian Distillery PawPaw Moonshine
Digestif
The Secret of the Pie-verse
***
A Note:
The courses of my life’s meal are creative takes on my memories. In each case, I am concerned with nursing out flavors, combining parallel stories with sustenance. The connections are a bit abstract here and there in order to make a meal that flows well from one course to the next, but that is the joy in this pursuit. As I poured over each course, combining my distinct food memory with the techniques and flavor combinations I have learned in over a decade in the restaurant and food industry, I realized that just as I do when I remember, I also re-member - I take a bit from here and there and create something altogether alive and new.
Each course includes a subsequent recipe in the case you would like to duplicate this meal. I would be honored should you choose this. I am more concerned, however, that this collection of words, stories, and recipes gets under your culinary skin in such a way that you begin to plumb your own mind for the dishes and dinners and deliciousness that have dug deeply in your own divine moments of eating, drinking, and being merry.
Are you ready? Let’s eat.
(Chapter 1, excerpt)
Food is my most durable religion. I experience the divine in a meal’s procurement, preparation, and communal sharing. Having graduated with a Masters of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and immediately baptized into the trench warfare of the restaurant industry, that unlikely connection became evident over time.
As a baker in a nouveau “nothin’ fancy” Southern restaurant, the rustic treats I created were sugar sermons, carbohydrate calls to worship, humble homilies of hospitality: fresh buttermilk biscuits, honey butter cornbread, peach cobbler, pecan pie, strawberry rhubarb shortcake, pumpkin cake with local hard cider-glaze.
Moments of tiny transcendences were experienced by our guests, whether that be a much-needed escape from a bad day in this non-stop shit-show world or a visitation of a holy moment, the resurrection of a memory and the retelling of a sacred story.
Years later, after opening a pie shop on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, I realized the power of food to surpass the transactions of capitalistic exchange to a transsubstantive experience.
A pie, I learned, becomes much more than a crust, filling, and top. It is a process of the work of my hands to alchemically combine flour, sugar, salt, and butter into dough, allowing it to rest, then rolling it, letting it rest again, crimping it, letting it rest, working on a filling, letting it rest, combining the layers together for baking, letting it rest, slicing and serving, sharing, and then? The soul rests.
I’m talking about food that has the power and ability to transfix, capture, captivate.
An escape hatch from a present moment to a past one.
It is indeed possible, I learned, for a pie shop to be a sanctuary, the alloy aluminum chairs the pews, the table of the Lord a hand-crafted rough-hewn wood sourced from one town over, the communion of the saints surpassing Squarespace and Applepay, a small business a cloud of witness with the eucharist of espresso and crust, poured and broken. The light yellow walls of the pie shop a testament to miracles that arose over apples and chocolate and cinnamon and nectarines. Butter, that hot holy glue, binded together a newly-forged community of whosoever came into the shop and saw this food become the flesh and bones and blood of something greater.
Yes, food is my religion, redemption, love.
Maybe it’s that way for you, too.