Small Chefs, Big Pie - Grandparents.com

Toni Byrd is a cooking instructor at the Viking Range Company, which is located in her hometown of Greenwood, in the Mississippi Delta. She is also a yoga teacher. It is an unusual calling, teaching fine cooking as well as teaching a remedy for eating too much fine cooking, but the combination works for Byrd. She is 58 years old and frequently acts as the stand-in mother of her two grandchildren, who are 5 and 2 years old.

Only people from elsewhere, as they say in the Delta, make this mistake; everybody else knows that cooking runs in the Byrd family (her parents owned restaurants and were passionate cooks). Everybody knows that Byrd’s three children spent so much time in her kitchen that they assumed it was their “the family room.” They also know that Byrd began showing her grandchildren the culinary ropes not long after they could walk. They know this because the proud grandmother could not resist showing everybody she saw the two wee chefs coats, aprons, and chef's hats that she purchased for them.

“They are very proud of their outfits,” says Byrd who is the sort of Delta lady who understands the importance and power of proper personal presentation. She also believes that if clothes can make a man, pint-size chef’s coats can make a cook.

“I think that once they had the outfit, they just had to do the work,” she says. To facilitate this development, Byrd outfitted the kitchen in her home with child-size mixing spoons, measuring cups, and whisks.

“That’s what they can do — they can measure things and pour things and stir things,” she says. Cookies are a favorite — “lots of mixing and rolling and almost instant gratification, warm from the oven,” says Byrd. Another perennial favorite is her mother’s famous fudge pie. Like the ability to cook, the weakness for fudge pie runs in the Byrd family. Here is how the pie was born:

After her husband’s death, Nancy Byrd continued to run the family restaurant. She was always looking for new things to add to the menu, new things for people to talk about. At some point in the 1950s, she noticed that recipes for chocolate pie were beginning to appear. Being a Byrd, she could not, of course, accept somebody else’s recipe. And being a child of the Delta, she assumed that if chocolate is good, fudge is better. She took something from one recipe and a dash from another, says Nancy Byrd. It is possible that she simply took the chocolate used in every recipe she read, combined it with butter, and put it all in one pie.

Pie sales skyrocketed. People still talk about that remarkable pie. People also say that for every one sold to the public, at least two were consumed by the Byrd family who, even before yoga, showed no signs of an intimate and constant relationship with pie. However, members of the family admit to making SOS calls when the realities of modern living are at odds with making fudge pie.

“My daughter calls my mother, and at 83 years old, my mother makes her up a pie,” says Byrd, “I have also called my mother and I have also called my son." She is sure that her son will soon be able to turn to his toddlers when his work-week offers no time for pie.

“They love fudge pie,” says their grandmother. "They can already stir up eggs and crush graham crackers and help pour warm butter and chocolate, and they can stir.” In fact, her grandchildren’s dedication to learning how to make the family’s fudge pie often necessitates a costume change.

“They have back-up chef’s jackets and aprons,” says Byrd, “and maybe a back up to the back-up. I just can’t tell you how darling they look all suited up to cook.”