In Search of Hot Pie
Hot Pie? Are they serving a hot slice of pie, perhaps a la mode? Are they offering dessert as an entree? What goes on?
No, I discovered, Hot Pie is pizza. Only, it isn’t. Or it’s what people in the greater Binghamton ares—which includes Johnson City and Endicott—call pizza. Anyway, it’s complicated. And, as with most things where regional pizza interpretations are concerned, there’s a lot of debate and disagreement, as well as numerous distinctions without a difference.
But whisper the words “regional food” to me and you’ll get me moving. Red’s Kettle Inn was closed that day I spotted the sign. So we made a mental note to make it our first stop the next time we hit the Binghamton-Johnson City-Endicott area, a sprawling urban area in the Southern Tier section of New York State where once separate cities are jammed up against each other, and share a host of local eating traditions, including spiedies and hot pie.
Spiedies—chunks of chicken, pork or lamb that are marinated in a kind of salad dressing and then grilled over a charcoal and served on a bun—are the district’s best known regional food. Hot pie, meanwhile, keeps under the radar. Despite a dozen visits to the Binghamton area over the past three years, I’d never heard of it until that most recent trip. A little research told me the delicacy went back at least to the 1930s, and that a handful of Binghamton, Johnson City and Endicott Italian restaurants still made it. Two had closed during the pandemic: Oasis, a Johnson City bar that dates to 1918; and Lampy’s, a relatively new restaurant in Endicott. That left Little Venice and Cortese, two red-sauce institutions in Binghamton; Consol’s in Endicott; and Red’s Kettle Inn in Johnson City. We decided to hit them all, compare and contrast, and learn first hand what exactly hot pie was, and how it differed from pizza.
The term hot pie probably began simply as a synonym for pizza, a variation of the more familiar "pizza pie.” Ads for Italian restaurants in the Binghamton area from the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s talk about “hot pie,” “Italian hot pie,” “pizza hot pies,” etc. A 1938 ad for an Endicott eatery reads “Come and enjoy the Italian hot pie, better known as pizza.” A 1936 ad for a restaurant, confusingly named La Pizza, instructs, “Ask your Italian friend about Italian hot pie.”
So both names were in circulation. But while the term pizza grew in popularity over the years, both in the Southern Tier and beyond, the phrase hot pie died out everywhere but Binghamton. Over the decades, local newspapers regularly fielded reader requests for home recipes for hot pie. There were also regular classifieds from employers seeking hot pie makers. Not pizza; hot pie.
One thing that can’t be denied is that over the years, at least in Binghamton, hot pie evolved into something marginally separate from what the world has come to embrace as pizza.
Little Venice was our first stop, mainly because the restaurant was open for lunch. I had some ground to cover and needed to start early. It’s hard to escape the presence of Little Venice in Binghamton. It’s been around since 1946 and stands right next to the beautifully preserved old Greyhound bus station. I first experienced the place while nursing a Negroni at the bar while waiting for a bus. You can buy the restaurant’s popular bottled sauce in local gas stations. And I have.
Little Venice will tell you it served hot pie from the first. It disappeared from the menu in the 1970s and returned in 2004 as a nostalgia item. You can find it on the menu under “Pizza” along with the other pizzas.
That brings up one of the things that keeps you guessing about the nature of hot pie. Most of the restaurants that serve hot pie also serve pizza and treat the two as separate dishes, even though they’re quite similar. The difference, it seems, comes down to two things: tradition (there was always hot pie, so there will always be hot pie) and cheese.
Take the Little Venice hot pie. It’s a disc of tomato sauce dusted with Romana cheese alone. No mozzarella. (If someone in Binghamton gives you a pie with mozzarella, you know you’re not getting true hot pie.) Because of the absence of the all-enveloping, gooey Mozzarella, the character of the sauce shines through in a hot pie. Little Venice’s house sauce, which is beloved by locals, is very sweet and fruity. It was unmistakably the star of their hot pie. (Because of the combo of sauce and Romano, the pie was reminiscent of another upstate specialty, tomato pie, common in Utica, served in squares, and often eaten cold.)
Others have suggested that another thing signifying a Hot Pie is a crispier crust, since less oil is released into the dough by the cheese. That, however, was not the case with the chewy Little Venice crust.
Following a few hours rest, the next stop was Consol’s in Endicott, a town with a fairly strong Little Italy section. The streets of Endicott, a former company town whose residents worked for the long-gone Endicott Johnson shoe company, are quiet and empty. When you do encounter a business, it’s an Italian business, usually a restaurant or bakery.
Consol’s tale is complicated. The Consol family ran a place called Duff’s from 1946 to 1982. Duff was Adolph Consol, who ran the place and made all the food and seemingly did nothing else until he retired. He made hundreds of pies each day. “I missed a lot of things, weddings, parties,” he told a newspaper upon his retirement. “I’m not married. This has been my life.” Look at old photos of Duff’s on the walls of Consol’s and you can see signs advertising hot pie. (There is evidence that Oak’s Inn, which is just down the block from Consol’s, began selling hot pie in 1938, well before Duff’s. However, Oak’s—which is a great restaurant otherwise—doesn’t sell hot pie anymore. Or pizza, for that matter.)
The Duff’s tradition was revived in 1989 when a couple of Duff’s nephews decided to pick up the torch and open Consol’s, using the same recipes.
Consol’s has one of the most distinctive and charming food delivery systems I’ve ever encountered at any restaurant. The hot pies, which take all of seven minutes to make, are placed on a cardboard disc and then wrapped up in butcher paper, which is twisted into a handle to make for easy carrying. I suspect this is a relic from the days when hot pie thrived as a quick, inexpensive and portable working man’s lunch. Stories of the famed Lombardi’s in New York City say the restaurants pies were packaged for take-away in a similar way. The Consol’s pies are so popular that several were already made, wrapped and lined up on top of the oven when I arrived shortly after it opened for the day.
Consol’s crust was thin and crispy, its sauce tangy, and its cheese baked to a gorgeous brown; they say they only use provolone, but I have my suspicions, as Duff went on the record as using a special blend of four cheeses. The surface is covered with bubbles and pockets of cheese-covered dough. And the slices held up and didn’t flop over when picked up. If it reminded me of anything, is was the paper-thin, crispy pizzas you find in Roman pizzerias like Baffetto. But the Consol’s pie truly is its own thing and it is perfection.
Red’s Kettle Inn, a wood-paneled tavern founded in 1942 and filled with Yankees memorabilia—the Binghamton Triplets, a AAA farm team for the Yankees, played nearby—also once fed blue-collar workers in the area. Red was Anthony "Red" Sobiech and the place is still in the hands of the Sobiech family. At Red’s, hot pie is made with American cheese, which makes for a scorching hot surface that is best left alone for a few minutes before you venture a bite. For most Americans, of course, American cheese on a pizza is sacrilege. But here, it’s tradition. And while it definitely makes for an unusually flavored pie, Red’s came closer in character to a regular pizza than any I tasted that day. The crust was thin but chewy, like Little Venice’s. All in all, it was on the mild side in all flavor respects.
However, of all the pie palaces we visited that day, Red’s won on ambiance, a lived-in, mid-century saloon frozen in time. An old, red-leather-fronted bar anchors one of the long, dark room. Booths lit by faux Tiffany lamps gifted lone ago by the Miller brewing company line the space beyond the pool table. Mini-jukeboxes are nailed into the walls. There is a salad bar and customers take full advantage of it. If you want to understand the world Binghamton’s hard-working hot pie eaters lived in long ago, Red’s is probably a fair approximation.
It also gets points for having an actual neon sign saying “Hot Pies” in the window.
Cortese—like Little Venice, an old Italian restaurant with an anonymously modern interior—was the final stop. We got the pie to go; a person can only do so many sit-down meals in one day. We ordered from the bar and were very specific about what we wanted, since there are many standard pizzas on the Cortese menu. The words “hot pie” were spoken by both parties and I was sure our message had been received.
Nonetheless, when we got back to the hotel, we found ourselves saddled with a mozzarella pie. Tasted fine and all, but mistakes had been made. So we returned the next afternoon and were even more specific. This time we got what we wanted. I found out you have to call out for an “old-fashioned” hot pie if you want to avoid the dreaded Mozz.
Every hot pie we received that weekend was different from the last one, and Cortese’s was the most different of all. First of all, it was rectangular and cut in squares. The crust was light and airy, like foccacia bread. And the tomato sauce and Romano cheese were joined by a healthy dusting of oregano. I never object to a lot of oregano. This was one hot pie no one would ever mistake for a conventional pizza.
So what did I learn about the mysterious hot pie? Difficult to say. I’ve been pursuing regional food origin stories for a while now and I’ve gotten used to the fact there there is no bottom to the digging and you rarely attain any iron-clad conclusions. Does hot pie exist as a separate culinary dish? Binghamton says it does, but the rules of play are pretty amorphous. Basically, hot pie can be whatever the restaurant serving it says it is, as long as it doesn’t have mozzarella. On the whole, the dish is a pretty saucy affair. And it’s different enough from regular pizza that tradition and customer service demand it go by another name, lest confusion reign. If I ordered a pizza and got any of the pies I ate that weekend—save perhaps Red’s—I would be one surprised patron.
I suppose, nomenclature-wise, they could be called pizzas, if you threw in a couple adjectives to clear things up (Tomato-Romano Pizza? No-Mozzarella Pizza? Binghamton Pizza?). But there’s no fun in that and no history and no regional food lore. Long reign hot pie!
Challenge Accepted and Met
When I first launched this newsletter five and a half weeks ago, celebrated author David Kamp (The United States of Arugula, Sunny Days) generously offered an enthusiastic endorsement online, but with a caveat attached. He jokingly told potential readers of “The Mix” that they would be instructed “how to make such cocktails as the Rusty Vicar, the Fuzzy Truant, the Strident Alto, and the Purple Jacaranda.”
These cocktails, of course, do not exist. But I have decided that they should. Taking his jest as a challenge, I will over the course of time come up with recipes to match those fictitious cocktail names. As I am not a natural cocktail creator, this may take some time. But I’ve already managed to concoct a potion that I think handsomely answers to the handle of Rusty Victor.
The name was obviously a glancing reference to the Rusty Nail, so that it would include blended Scotch and the honeyed Scotch liqueur Drambuie was a given. That left me to wonder what a Vicar might drink. Port seemed a bit heavy and sweet; the drink already had the syrupy Drambuie to contend with. Perhaps Sherry, dearly loved by the English for centuries, was the ticket. A fino would efficiently cut through the thick Drambuie, as well as bring down the alcohol content of the drink. I ended up with a split base of Sherry and Scotch, the Drambuie playing a decidedly supporting role. To this I added a couple dashes each of orange and Angostura bitters, and an orange twist. The cocktail drinks like the love child of a Rusty Nail and an Adonis (Sherry, sweet vermouth, bitters). But don’t tell the Vicar his cocktail is illegitimate.
Next up: the Fuzzy Truant. Where’d that bottle of Peach Schnapps get to?
Robert Simonson, 2022
Combine liquid ingredients in a mixing glass half-filled with ice. Stir until chilled, about 15 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Express orange twist over the surface of the drink and drop into the glass.
Coming up later this week for paid subscribers: Wisconsin’s ice-cream cocktails; the state of the Grasshopper; a visit from Madrid; more cocktail recipes; a Field Report from a location TBD; and Odds and Ends.
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