Lumberjack Redemption: Blue Ribbon Pie (part deux)

Though all of us have some acquaintance with career meltdown, Dave ‘the Pie Guy’ Hulett, set the standard for humiliation the day he dropped a conifer on some high-tension power lines not far from the headwaters of the Mississippi. He might well have assumed that his prospects had been sold down Ol’ Man River, as the showtune lament puts it,

Show me dat stream called de river Jordan,
Dats de ol’ stream dat I long to cross.

Maybe it was that random Dairy Queen – home of takeaway summer treats, but which had forever blown his cover as a lumberjack – that had fixed itself in Dave’s firmament as a sign of doom, a sign that he determined to remake into a calling. He did drift down river – not to a grim fate, but only as far as Minneapolis. There he passed himself off in a hotel kitchen one day as something of a Julia Childs understudy – emphasis on ‘under’ – though he knew about as much about cooking as his erstwhile gym buddy, Ah’nold (Schwartzenegger) whose only confections might have been the subject of police inquiries.

But Dave won a try-out with the chef who swung into action on a basic white sauce to test whether the rookie could replicate the result. However much of an imposter Dave was, he had this virtue: as he had once been an observant and devoted tree hugger, Dave wrapped his arms around every flourish of the chef, every pinch and squirt and simmer, and to his own amazement produced a result that cleared the bar. He was in.

The clatter of that kitchen, and his own proclivities, led him in time to the mysteries and delights of pastry, but most especially of pies. It turned into the calling that had eluded him so spectacularly in the northwoods but that has now earned him a moniker – ‘the Pie Guy’. Dave ‘the Pie Guy’ Hulett. It would be easy to miss the gravitas of such a handle. These latitudes of North America are the Mecca of pies. All the treasures of Old World pie savvy have been brought to brilliant triumph in the kitchens of this region where the abundance of apples, strawberries, pumpkins, cranberries, cherries, plums, rhubarb, blueberries and bushel baskets of other embarrassed fruits and vegetables that the Creator never intended for inclusion in pies, flourish in an unequaled profusion of pie splendor. It is there that Dave Hulett figures as ‘the Pie Guy’.

So exuberant is Dave in the practice of this craft, that it spills over into adjoining dishes, well adrift of the lane of ‘pastry’. Consider the following discovery that rivals anything brought to light at Los Alamos. Dave had applied to be a food hall exhibitor at a well-known fair in Wisconsin. Queried about what he proposed to serve at his stall, he mentioned apple pie among other things. This was greeted with derisive laughter at the other end of the line. What, asked the skeptic, did he think he could teach Wisconsin about apple pastry? (Dave had failed to fully grasp that a prominent town near the fair is called ‘Appleton’.) All right, rejoined Dave, have you ever heard about apples in chili-
con-carne?

This met with stunned silence. A stall was reserved to Dave forthwith. At the grand opening of the fair, he appeared at his stall with a full complement of his finest pies – and a pot of his breakthrough apple chili-con-carne. It sold out before lunch on the first day of the fair. Wisconsin has barely recovered from his out-of-the-box stroke of genius. But here is the ironic twist to any visit at Dave’s Minneapolis pie shop. You may order any of his prize-winning numbers – the French silk, the apple streusel, the cherry lattice – but as you drive away, you will begin to ask yourself, which of the pies was it I had the good fortune to sample? It’s all gone fuzzy. All for the brilliance of the yarn he tells you having pulled up a chair to the table asking, ‘Have I ever told you about growing up at
the lakehead in Duluth …?’

Nothing dazzles like a riveting story. You can take that to the bank. Dave did.