Don’t Miss: Food Lover’s Book Club (Wednesday, October 29)

Food Lover’s Book Club is a bimonthly discussion of a cookbook or food-related book led by 5280‘s food editor Amanda M. Faison.

Pie is a delicious juxtaposition: it’s simple yet celebratory. It’s at home at both the backyard barbecue and the holiday table. Its image is invoked to reference a slice of Americana, and it’s a source of heated debate (butter vs. shortening vs. lard). Pie incites such love and dialogue because it symbolizes heritage. Many of us make seasonal and special-occasion pies from recipe cards written in our mother’s, grandmother’s, or even great-grandmother’s handwriting. Pie is connection.

The same is true for Emily and Melissa Elsen, the authors of Four & Twenty Blackbirds (the book selection for this month’s Food Lover’s Book Club). The sisters came up through the Calico Kitchen, their mother’s restaurant in Hecla, South Dakota, where their grandmother Liz’s pie was a constant. Eventually, the sisters opened Four & Twenty Blackbirds pie shop in Brooklyn with the mission “to create a gathering place to support and serve our community with really good pie and coffee.” Because, in the end, that’s what pie is about: It’s comforting, welcoming, satisfying, and above all, delicious.

Whether you’ve read and cooked from the book or not, join Shauna Lott from the Long I Pie and me for a discussion of all things pie on Wednesday, October 29, at the Cherry Creek Library.

Bonus: A crust demo (thanks, Shauna!) and tasty pie samples.

Next up: The Making of a Cookbook on December 10—same time, same place. Join Boulder chef and cookbook author Eric Skokan and me to talk about our newly released cookbooks (Farm, Fork, Food and 5280: The Cookbook, respectively). Find out what it takes—along with the good, the bad, and the ugly—to write and publish a cookbook. Join us in reading, cooking, and chatting all things food. Plus: snacks from the books.

Free, 6 p.m., Ross-Cherry Creek Branch Library, 305 Milwaukee St., 720-865-0120.

Follow food editor Amanda M. Faison on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

—Photo via Shutterstock