She had been selling pies from her grandmother’s kitchen at the small Oxford farmers' market for nine years. The food writer arrived on a Saturday in late October without warning.
The kitchen had belonged to Eulalie Whitfield’s grandmother since 1962. It was a kitchen in a small one-story bungalow on a small quiet street in the small Burns Avenue neighborhood of Oxford, three blocks from the small downtown square. Her grandmother had passed in 2014. The bungalow had been passed, by the will her grandmother had drawn up in 2009, to Eulalie. She had moved in that fall. She had been twenty-six.
She had inherited, along with the bungalow, the collection of her grandmother’s recipes. The collection lived in a small accordion folder her grandmother had been keeping since 1958, on a shelf above the small refrigerator. The folder contained, by Eulalie’s careful inventory in November of 2014, approximately a hundred and forty recipes in her grandmother’s handwriting, ranging from the everyday ones — biscuits, cornbread, fried chicken, the Mississippi greens her grandmother had been making every Sunday for fifty years — to the celebratory ones for weddings and Thanksgivings and church suppers.
Approximately fourteen of the recipes were pies.
The pies were the particular thing her grandmother had been known for in the Burns Avenue neighborhood. She had been making them for almost sixty years. She had been making them, by the methodology she had refined over those sixty years, in a way that Eulalie had been watching since approximately the age of four.
Eulalie had thought, in the slow careful weeks of November of 2014 after the inheritance had settled, that she might keep making them.
II. The first nine years.
She had begun selling them at the Oxford farmers' market on the first Saturday of May, 2015. The small market — held in the parking lot of the Mid-Town Shopping Center on North Lamar — had been the Oxford institution she had been visiting on Saturday mornings since approximately 2008. She had asked the market manager, in a conversation in late April, whether she could rent a small table.
The market manager — a older man named Wendell Pruitt, who had been running the market since 2001 — had said yes. He had charged her ten dollars per Saturday. She had paid him, in advance, for the initial six Saturdays.
She had brought, that first Saturday, six pies. They had been three of her grandmother’s sweet potato pies and three of her grandmother’s buttermilk-chess pies. She had priced them at twenty-two dollars each.
They had sold by ten-thirty.
She had brought twelve the following Saturday. They had sold by eleven. She had brought fifteen the Saturday after. They had sold by eleven-fifteen.
She had stayed at fifteen pies a Saturday for almost two years, because fifteen was, by the arithmetic of her grandmother’s small kitchen and her own small Friday-evening labor schedule, the maximum she could produce without compromising the quality.
She had raised her prices, by gentle careful increments, over the first three years — from twenty-two dollars to twenty-eight in 2016, from twenty-eight to thirty-four in 2017, from thirty-four to forty in 2018. The pies had continued to sell out by eleven.
She had taken, in 2018, a second job. She had been working as a office manager at a local insurance agency on the square. The job had given her the steady weekly income that allowed her to keep the pie business — which she had begun, in the slow careful evenings of late 2018, to think of as a potential business rather than as a Saturday hobby — careful and slow.
She had hired, in 2019, her first employee. The employee was a young woman from her grandmother’s church named Tia Eubanks, who had been a sophomore at the University of Mississippi at the time and who had been willing, by gentle joint arrangement, to work approximately eight hours on Friday evenings in the kitchen for fifteen dollars an hour.
By the end of 2019, the Saturday output had reached twenty-four pies.
By the end of 2021 — after the slow careful Covid pause of 2020, which she had spent doing curbside pickup at her grandmother’s small driveway — the Saturday output had reached thirty-two pies.
By the end of 2023, after she had hired a second employee — a older woman from the neighborhood named Mrs. Doreen Tate, who had been making pies in her own small kitchen for fifty years and who was, by gentle joint arrangement, paid eighteen dollars an hour for approximately ten hours of small Friday-evening work — the Saturday output had reached forty pies.
The price, by 2023, had risen to fifty-five dollars per pie.
She had been, by the arithmetic of her honest spreadsheet at the small kitchen table on the New Year’s Eve of 2023, generating approximately a hundred and fourteen thousand dollars in annual gross revenue from the Saturday market.
She had still, by her gentle private decision in early 2023, been keeping the job at the insurance agency. She had been keeping it, by her honest later description in our conversation in November, because the work of the insurance agency was the work of a Oxford office manager, and she had been, by her gentle internal accounting, a Oxford office manager.
She had not, by her gentle private estimate, been small specifically planning to ever become anything else.
III. The food writer.
The food writer arrived on a Saturday in late October of last year. He had driven down from Memphis the previous evening. He had not, by his honest later description in the piece he eventually published, called ahead.
His name was Andrew Reeve. He was a staff writer at Garden & Gun magazine. He had been working on a feature about Mississippi pie makers for approximately three months. He had been, by his honest later description in the published piece, working through a list of pie makers across the state — older women, mostly, in kitchens in towns from Tupelo to Hattiesburg. He had been told, by approximately four Mississippi food acquaintances over the course of the previous three months, that he needed to visit a young pie maker named Eulalie Whitfield at the Oxford farmers' market.
He had finally driven down on the Friday evening, taken a room at the Graduate Hotel on the square, and walked over to the market the following morning at eight-thirty.
The pies were the sweet potato, the buttermilk-chess, the pecan, the chocolate-chess, and a seasonal one — a concord-grape pie that Eulalie’s grandmother had been making for one Saturday a year in late October, in the tradition of using the grapes from a arbor in the back yard of the bungalow.
Andrew Reeve bought one of each. He took them to a picnic table on the far side of the parking lot. He ate slices of each one, slowly and carefully, with a plastic fork that the market provided.
He stayed at the picnic table for almost an hour.
Then he walked back to Eulalie’s table at the south end of the small market. The Saturday market had begun, by then, to slow into the late-morning lull. Eulalie was sitting at her folding chair with a thermos of coffee.
Andrew introduced himself. He told her, in the direct manner of a magazine writer who had been doing this kind of introduction for fifteen years, who he was and what he was working on. He asked her, in the gentle manner of his introduction, whether she would be willing to sit with him for a interview.
She had looked at him for a long moment.
She had not, by her honest later description, ever been interviewed by a magazine writer.
She had said yes.
IV. The interview.
The interview had taken place over the subsequent two days, in the kitchen of the bungalow on Burns Avenue. Andrew had asked, by his gentle careful request on the Saturday afternoon, whether he could observe the Friday-evening production. Eulalie had said yes. He had been at the bungalow that Friday — he had stayed in Oxford for the week — at five in the evening. He had watched, by gentle careful arrangement, the production of the following day’s forty pies. He had watched Tia. He had watched Mrs. Tate. He had watched Eulalie.
He had asked, in the gentle careful way of magazine writers, the questions. About the recipes. About the way Eulalie’s grandmother had taught her the methodology. About the sourcing of the ingredients — the local pecans, the local sweet potatoes from a farm in Lafayette County, the local buttermilk from a dairy in Calhoun County. About the decision to keep the Saturday-market business careful and slow rather than scaling.
Eulalie had answered, by her gentle careful description in our conversation, the way she had been answering questions from market customers for nine years. She had not, by her honest later description, attempted to perform for the magazine writer. She had simply, in the gentle Mississippi way of careful neighborhood women, told him the truth about the work.
Andrew had stayed in Oxford until the following Wednesday. He had observed two production cycles. He had eaten, by Eulalie’s gentle later count, approximately twenty-three slices of pie. He had taken, by the permission of Eulalie and her two employees, approximately three hundred photographs.
He had driven back to Memphis on Wednesday evening.
He had emailed Eulalie on the Friday morning, two days later. The email had said only: Thank you for the week. The piece will run in the March issue. I will send you the drafts before it goes to press.
V. The March issue.
The March issue of Garden & Gun arrived in Oxford mailboxes in the second week of February.
The piece — titled, by Andrew’s headline, The Burns Avenue Pies — was the cover feature. The cover photograph showed Eulalie sitting at her Saturday-market folding chair with a concord-grape pie on the table in front of her. The interior of the piece was approximately five thousand four hundred words. It included, by the magazine’s standard photographic budget, approximately fourteen photographs.
The piece described the methodology Eulalie had inherited from her grandmother. It described the Saturday market. It described the kitchen on Burns Avenue. It described, in the gentle Mississippi prose that Andrew Reeve had spent fifteen years perfecting, the particular thing that Eulalie Whitfield was making and the particular reason that the thing she was making was, by Andrew’s honest reading, one of the most important things being made in the contemporary American pie tradition.
The piece appeared online on the first Tuesday of February.
By Wednesday morning, Eulalie’s Saturday-market table had sold out by nine-fifteen, when she had only been open for ninety minutes.
By Friday morning, the email account she had set up for her Saturday-market business in 2017 had received approximately four hundred and sixty inquiries.
By the following Saturday morning, the pie line at the market had begun forming at approximately six-thirty.
VI. The decision.
I want to be careful, in writing the next part, about the decisions Eulalie made between February and June of this year. The popular American story of pie maker who gets discovered by a national magazine tends, by its shape, to compress the decisions into a dramatic moment of the pie maker accepting a nationwide retail deal and opening a national e-commerce shipping operation. The actual shape of Eulalie Whitfield’s four months between the online publication of The Burns Avenue Pies and the Friday afternoon I sat with her at her grandmother’s kitchen table in early June was not, by her honest description, a dramatic moment.
It was a slow set of conversations.
She had been contacted, in the weeks following the online publication, by approximately fourteen national retail buyers, three television producers, two cookbook agents, one national grocery chain, and approximately eight Mississippi-based business consultants.
She had, by her honest later description, declined all of them.
She had declined them, by her gentle careful explanation in our June conversation, for the same reason her grandmother had declined a similar set of approaches in 1978, when her grandmother had been briefly featured in a regional cooking magazine.
The reason was that the pies could not, by the methodology Eulalie’s grandmother had developed and that Eulalie had inherited, be made at any scale larger than the scale they were currently being made at.
The sweet potatoes had to come from the farm in Lafayette County, which produced approximately two hundred bushels of the specific cultivar her grandmother had used per season. The pecans had to come from the small orchard in Yalobusha County, which produced approximately one thousand pounds per season. The buttermilk had to come from the dairy in Calhoun County, which produced approximately four hundred gallons per year of the specific cultured buttermilk her grandmother had used. The concord grapes — for the October pie — had to come from the arbor in the back yard of the small bungalow on Burns Avenue, which produced approximately sixty pounds of grapes per October.
The total seasonal supply of the specific ingredients was sufficient, by Eulalie’s honest seasonal calculations, to produce approximately fifty-two hundred pies per year. The Saturday market was already, by 2023, absorbing approximately two thousand of those.
Scaling beyond the current Saturday-market operation would require either substituting different ingredients — which would, by Eulalie’s honest reading, no longer be the pies her grandmother had taught her to make — or building a larger supply network that did not, by the scarcity of the ingredients in question, currently exist.
She had declined the national approaches.
She had, by gentle internal decision in mid-March, made a different set of decisions.
VII. The different decisions.
She had decided, by gentle careful conversation with Tia and Mrs. Tate in the kitchen on the third Friday evening of March, to triple the Friday-evening production team. She had hired, between late March and late April, four additional employees — three of them young women from the University of Mississippi and one of them an older woman from her grandmother’s church. The new total Friday-evening team was six people, including Eulalie herself.
She had decided, by gentle careful negotiation in late March, to expand the Saturday-market production from forty pies to a hundred and twenty. The expansion required, by her honest careful calculations, that she increase her purchases from the farm in Lafayette County and the orchard in Yalobusha County and the dairy in Calhoun County. She had visited, by her gentle private decision in early April, all three of the suppliers in person. She had agreed, by gentle careful joint conversation with each of them, to pre-purchase contracts for the 2025 harvest season.
She had decided, by gentle careful private decision in early April, to leave the job at the insurance agency. She had given the agency a eight-week notice. The agency had thrown her a farewell lunch on the last Friday of May.
She had decided, by gentle careful private decision in late April, to keep the Saturday-market operation in the Burns Avenue kitchen rather than moving to a commercial kitchen. The Burns Avenue kitchen was the kitchen her grandmother had taught her in. It was, by every internal reading, the kitchen the pies needed to be made in.
She had decided, by gentle careful private decision in late May, to raise the price of the pies from fifty-five dollars to seventy-five.
She had decided, by gentle careful private decision in early June, not to ship the pies anywhere outside of the Saturday-market operation.
If customers wanted the pies, they would, by Eulalie’s gentle public statement in a follow-up note she had posted on the market website, need to come to Oxford on a Saturday morning.
VIII. Why it stays.
I sat with Eulalie Whitfield in the kitchen of her grandmother’s bungalow on Burns Avenue on a Friday afternoon in early June. The Friday-evening production team had been due to arrive at five. The kitchen had been, that afternoon, in the mid-afternoon preparation mode — sweet potatoes on the counter, pecans in a glass bowl, buttermilk in a pitcher, the crusts already rolled out and resting in the refrigerator.
She did not, in our conversation, characterize the decisions she had made in the four months since the magazine piece in any heroic or strategic terms. She characterized them the way a thirty-six-year-old Mississippi pie maker who had been making the pies for nine years would characterize them. She had inherited a methodology. The methodology had a specific scale at which it could be done well. She had grown the operation to the largest scale at which the methodology could still be done well.
That was the end of the arithmetic.
“My grandmother,” she said, “would not have wanted the pies to be shipped to customers in California. She would not have wanted the pies to be sold in national grocery stores. She would not have wanted the pies to be made in a commercial kitchen by a staff of forty people. She would have wanted, by every honest reading of the way she lived her own life, the pies to be made by careful hands, in a Mississippi kitchen, by careful people who had been taught the methodology by careful older people who had themselves been taught it carefully.”
She paused.
“The national magazine attention,” she said, “did not, by my honest internal reading, change any of that. The attention is kind. I am grateful. But the methodology has not changed.”
The slow careful difference between a small American food business that scales into something other than itself and one that does not is, sometimes, the moment when the founder decides, by gentle careful private decision in early April, that she is going to honor the methodology even if the methodology limits the scale.
Across the United States, in Saturday farmers' markets and inherited kitchens and national food publications that have published features about pie makers in Mississippi towns, the slow patient question of whether to scale or whether to stay small is being quietly answered, every careful day, by the founders of regional food businesses. Most of them, in the presence of national attention, scale. A handful of them, by gentle careful private decision in early April, do not. For broader context on the long American history of regional food traditions and the available infrastructure of artisanal small-business preservation, readers can spend time with the materials at the U.S. Small Business Administration or the long-form reporting at PBS NewsHour. The Chapbook keeps its narratives clean, human, and responsible — read more in the Editorial Policy.
The Saturday-market table is, this October, still in the south end of the parking lot of the Mid-Town Shopping Center in Oxford. The line for the pies begins forming, by Eulalie’s honest description, at approximately six in the morning. The pies sell out, by every consistent week, by ten-thirty.
The concord-grape pies — the October pies, made from the grapes of the arbor in the back yard of the small bungalow on Burns Avenue — will be available, this Saturday, for the one Saturday a year that her grandmother had always made them.
The price will be eighty dollars.
The line for the concord-grape pies, by Eulalie’s gentle private estimate, will likely begin forming at four in the morning.
