BIG EASY JUNK FOOD RETURNS
And Hubig's Said, Let Them Eat Pie

From the New York Times:

This city savors some pleasures not so much for what they are as for what they were.

Thus the local esteem for the Hubig's Pie, a glazed turnover of fried dough and fruit filling, sugary-sweet, palm-size, modest in its aspirations but, since the 1920's, unaltered. And, until Hurricane Katrina, never absent.

But for four months now, New Orleans has done painfully without: Hubig's lost half its employees and a third of its trucks, and returned to huge cracks in its ancient bakery.

Monday, the pies were back. All over town, any driver the Simon Hubig Company could find walked into whatever grocery stores were open, bearing cardboard trays of pies, palm up.

Click here for the rest.

I can't wait until they start shipping to Baton Rouge again.

Since Katrina, each trip to a convenience store here, seeing that there are no Hubig's Pies for sale, has been a sad reminder of what's happened to New Orleans . It's like Scrooge's vision of Tiny Tim's empty stool in the corner reminding the Cratchit family of his death. For a while there it was particularly poignant. Back in September, I would be like, "I'll just pick me up a Hubig's and...oh yeah...there aren't any Hubig's Pies anymore; there's not a New Orleans anymore." But as the Big Easy rebuilds, things are getting back to normal. Very slowly.

This is a good sign.

You might wonder why I even give a crap about a cheap-o fried pie in the first place. Well, obviously, these fried pies are pretty damned good. I mean, it's not like they're the greatest pastries known to man or anything, but they beat the hell out of any prepackaged dessert item I've ever had by miles and miles. Really. Look, I know that you may have the urge to write my assertions off as coming from the kind of nerdy weirdo you knew in high school who had a strange taste for Twinkies or Ding-Dongs, but it's not like that at all. Prepackaged desserts suck bigtime. That's why Hubig's Pies are so amazing: they don't suck. And for 89 cents a pop...well...that's just one of the fringe benefits of living so close to New Orleans--apparently, this is the only area where they're available.

So this makes me happy. It's a visible and eatable symbol of my favorite city's struggle to rebuild. Hooray! Hubig's is back!


Yum.

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