Important Links:

Listen to Celia Rivenbark read her story, “Grape Expectations on Highway 117,” from The Carolina Table:

Read more about Celia and her work:
Celia Rivenbark website



To purchase a copy of Carolina Table, click here:

http://www.enopublishers.org/books/the-carolina-table-north-carolina-writers-on-food

Music for this episode is entitled “Brothers,” by Heartland Night. It’s available on Soundstripe.

27 Views Season 3 Show Notes

Episode 25: Eating Grape Pie With Humorist Celia Rivenbark

Writer Celia Rivenbark reaches back to her high school days to explore the humor and challenges of waiting tables at her small town’s only sit-down restaurant. It served the best food in town and featured the most elaborate salad bar east of Raleigh. It also came with a sizeable portion of unapologetic Lost Cause nostalgia. It might have been 1974, but social change and extending a warm welcome to Yankees passing through on their way to Florida were not necessarily on the menu.

Recipe—

Here it is. My favorite pie of all time. A little slice of Eastern North Carolina on a well-worn china plate at a restaurant on the four lane in Wallace, North Carolina. 

Annie Faye Norris’s Grape Hull Pie

Filling:

2          pounds muscadine grapes

½         cup water

¼         stick butter

1          cup sugar

2          ounces fresh lemon juice

pinch of mace

2          tablespoons cornstarch

In a large bowl, use your fist to mash those grape hulls away from their pulp insides. It’s violent, but wonderfully so. Let it all out. Surely somebody has done you wrong this week at some point.

Cook that squished hulls and pulp mixture in a saucepan over medium heat until the seeds separate from the pulp. Pour the pulp through a colander and discard the seeds. Return the grapes to the saucepan and add the water. Cook until the hulls are fork-tender. Add butter, sugar, lemon juice, and mace. Add cornstarch, which you have mixed with enough cold water to make it nice and smooth (about 2 or 3 tablespoons). Continue cooking until it’s nice and thickened.

Remove from heat.

Pour into 2 unbaked pie shells and bake at 350° for about 45 minutes.

Remove the pies from the oven, and top with meringue made from 4 or 5 egg whites beaten till stiff with a half cup or so of sugar and cream of tartar. Once you’ve piled that meringue high, put the pies back in the oven and let those meringue peaks get brown under the broiler. Watch closely; you don’t want the meringue to burn.

Serve Grape Hull Pie at room temperature or chilled. Tell your children how it’s done. They will thank you one day.

Bio—
Humorist Celia Rivenbark was born and raised in Teachey, North Carolina, just down the road from Wallace, NC, and Norris’s Restaurant. She began her writing career at age twenty when she was hired as a reporter and jack of all trades for the Wallace Enterprise. From there she went on to the Wilmington Star News after an editor read a story she wrote for the Enterprise about the rare birth of a mule. She eventually began writing a weekly humor column that became widely syndicated. It continues to this day, but now with a more political bent. Celia is a New York Times-best-selling author who has published seven books, including We're Just Like You, Only Prettier; You Can't Drink All Day, If You Don't Start in the Morning; and most recently, Rude Bitches Make Me Tired. She wrote the essay, “Grape Expectations on Highway 17,” for Eno Publishers’s The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, as well as the the Introduction to Eno Publishers’s anthology, 27 Views of Wilmington: The Port City in Prose & Poetry. Celia has written or co-written a number of plays, including a stage adaptation of “Rude Bitches,” which won Best Original Play at the annual Wilmington Theater Awards, and a rollicking political comedy, “High Voter Turnout,” staged at historic Wilmington’s Thalian Hall in 2023.