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As Pastry Chefs Decline in Ranks, a Revolution in Cakes and Pies
They’re arguing for their place at top restaurants by imbuing classic desserts with new forms, ingredients and undeniable originality.
PIE, NICOLE RUCKER will tell you, has its own story to tell. On the Los Angeles baker’s Instagram feed, that tale includes golden, all-butter crusts that bubble over with apricots, rhubarb, strawberries and peaches — and one that comes infused with THC. They convey bounty and comfort, as pies do, but also wanton experimentation: The weed one, topped with candied cannabis leaves from Rucker’s own garden and served at a friend’s birthday party, was a marriage between classic key lime and “all of the new products,” the chef says.
Earlier in the month, when Rucker opened her Fairfax-district restaurant Fiona, she joined a community of (mostly female) pastry chefs reimagining old-fashioned, all-American desserts, like pie and layer cake, with alternative grains and sweeteners, imported international herbs or forms that upend our expectation of what these desserts — once the domain of stay-at-home mothers, or at least mom-and-pop bakeries — should look like today. At Theorita, Angela Pinkerton’s new San Francisco dinette, the sweetness of passion fruit meringue is tempered with earthy bay leaf cream; matcha powder colors many of the fruit tarts that Carolyn Nugent created at San Francisco’s Tartine Manufactory, the results both verdant and otherworldly; and sourdough frequently appears in the pastries that Zoe Kanan produces at the Freehand New York hotel, where her colleague Charmaine McFarlane is using heritage grains such as einkorn (a type of nutty wheat) to create “a whole new world of cake,” like a chamomile-buckwheat one that’s paired with beeswax ice cream.
In America, such treats have long referenced the old world as well as the new. Both pie and cake came over with the pilgrims, then were later served in colonial taverns and inns. Pie went domestic in the early 20th century, as cookbook authors and flour companies started marketing their goods to the masses. “Suddenly, it became this iconic thing that your grandmother made,” says Stephen Schmidt, a food historian and the author of “Dessert in America.” Early American cakes were smaller and plainer (think British-style poundcakes), but as U.S. sugar production accelerated in the early 19th century, so too did layer cakes, their heft supported by access to baking powder and cast-iron stoves, both of which became common in homes by the early 1900s.
By the midcentury, such treats found pride of place on the dessert trolleys whizzing around the white tablecloth restaurants that began to proliferate in cities, which necessitated extra cooks to bake such bounties. Originally, this was not a specialized role: “When I started out teaching in the ’70s, there were no pastry chefs in New York restaurants, except for maybe at La Caravelle or the Four Seasons,” says Nick Malgieri, the retired founder of the baking program at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan. “But when the American food revolution kicked up in the early ’80s, everyone wanted to have a pastry chef.” They established smaller, delicate portions and a more labor-intensive style of plating. Along with dismembered chunks of dough, elaborate herb garnishes and ice cream quenelles, that decade welcomed the molten chocolate cake, which the French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten debuted in New York in 1987 to rapturous acclaim. It continued to reign into the 21st century, as did artful deconstructions. If you wanted a traditional pie or cake, your best recourse was to find a diner, or just make one yourself.
SO WHAT CHANGED? Economics, essentially. If the post-recession farm-to-table craze of the last decade brought a return to homier desserts — particularly at bakeries like Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar (there are now 15 across North America), where layer cakes and pies are built as much from whimsy as sugar — it also introduced rising labor and operating costs that have made restaurants’ margins, punishing in the best of times, even less accommodating to the pastry chef. Today, a restaurant may employ a pastry chef but no pastry cooks, which means “that person has to dumb down the menu so it’s simpler to execute,” Pinkerton says. It’s also become de rigueur to ask savory-minded line cooks to once again handle dessert, a development that has yielded a profusion of creamy refrigerated treats such as sundaes, panna cotta and crème brûlée.
These new pies and cakes, then, offer a solution for restaurants that do still hire pastry chefs or those lucky few bakers who have made big enough names to open their own ventures. Such large-format desserts offer slight financial advantages over complexly plated individual ones, since a single pastry chef can make and freeze lots of pie crust or layers of sponge cake at once, and the finished product (which might feed a dozen or more people) requires only slicing, not elaborate garnishing. At Fiona, Rucker’s pies are limited to two flavors daily. But “I’ll make as many pies as people want,” she says. “If the customer can support a multitude, I’m there for it.”
Which brings us to the real crux of pie’s story: As pastry chefs dwindle, it’s on them to make dessert seem essential. Perhaps it’s not surprising that these bakers are rethinking comfort and indulgence as their place in the restaurant industry is threatened. Scarcity, after all, begets both recalibration and innovation — especially in an era when any dish is expected to win praise on social media and woo jaded diners bored by their ever-increasing options. These sweets, it turns out, were hiding in the back of the pantry all along: so old that they seem fresh. Because you can do whatever you want to a pie or a cake and — so long as you respect the basic technical requirements — its very form will conjure nostalgic pleasure. To these bakers, that is both challenge and consolation. Diners these days “are not really happy with just the chocolate-chip cookie or the croissant,” says Melissa Chou, the pastry chef at San Francisco’s Mister Jiu’s, where she crowns her classic banana cream pie, imbued with black sesame, in angular chevrons of mascarpone. “You have to offer them more.”
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