Whoops Goes the Whoopie Pie
A March 18 story in The New York Times declares the mainstreaming of whoopie pies, a retro sweet and a homespun comfort food for a recession-racked country.
What the story fails to mention is that the South has always had its own homespun cookielike “pie” that has always been mainstream and has never gone out of style enough to be called retro.
Yes, I am talking about MoonPies, which are first cousins to the whoopie pies popular in Maine and the Amish country of Pennsylvania.
These two treats aren’t identical. But they are similar enough that anyone trying to sell whoopie pies in the South would surely get rebuffed for simply trying to knock off a Southern classic.
MoonPies are two large and soft cookies with a marshmallow filling in which the whole shebang is coated with chocolate.
The big difference in whoopie pies is that they lack the chocolate coating. Instead the cookies themselves tend to be chocolate. The filling may be marshmallow fluff or creme, or it may be buttercream or some other white frosting.
The Chattanooga Bakery in Tennessee has been cranking out MoonPies since 1917 — about 10 years before the first reports of whoopie pies up north.
(According to Chattanooga Bakery, MoonPies are distributed nationwide, which makes me wonder why the Times story didn’t at least mention them.)
The Times story goes on to say that pumpkin cookies sometimes sub for chocolate ones. And now that they are showing up in Manhattan’s trendy Magnolia Bakery as well as Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe’s and other hip places, they are being fancified with such fillings as Cointreau, espresso, rum, and raspberry.
Espresso-flavored MoonPie? I don’t think so.
(The photo from The Associated Press shows MoonPies on the assembly line, getting ready for the chocolate coating, at the Chattanooga Bakery.)
