Buttermilk pie ca. 1928 with muddled raspberries, spearmint ice, and cracked pepper candy ($7)

Our tournant Rick wanted to put a buttermilk pie on the menu for summer, and right away it's obvious that it's a great pairing with summer fruits. Whenever we're looking to put a time-tested and old-school dish like buttermilk pie on the menu, my first instinct is to dust off the old cookbooks and see what wisdom can be gleaned from the old days. For lots of reasons one of the first books I cracked open for this one was Mrs. Dull's Southern Cooking, published in Atlanta in 1928. She offers two buttermilk custard filling recipes and I chose the second one since it is a once-cooked custard similar to chess pie, and the only change I made was to substitute orange zest for the lemon zest since I'd already decided we'd be doing this with raspberries, and orange is a more favorable pairing and not a stretch at all. The finished pie is much like chess pie, in fact the similarity was stunning at first until the richness of the buttermilk comes through on the finish and is lifted all the way out on the palate by that exquisite buttermilk tang that doesn't quite have any other parallel. You'll have to try it for yourself to decide if it's superior to chess pie but I'm sold. I really like early raspberries for two things: brightly flavored desserts and preserves. While the buttermilk pie is rich, the high malic acid of the early raspberries is a great echo for the lactic acid in the buttermilk, and to keep the flavor as fresh as possible, the Seedling fruit is simply muddled with a little simple syrup. For an herbaceous component, spearmint from Stewards of the Land is pureed with simple syrup and constantly stirred during freezing to produce a heady and aromatic granita, and since I love cracked pepper with raspberries (and buttermilk and mint for that matter) a hard candy is made into super thin glass panes by baking inverted sugar mixed with cracked tellicherry pepper on silicon mats until set. They add spice, peppery aromatics, and that superfine crunch of hard candy in spun form. Even on the hottest summer day, this is an easy and delicious way to tickle your sweet tooth.

Pairing: American orange punch, ca. 1829 or a Pierre Ferrand reserve cognac

raspberries (local/white/specialty), dairy (local), farmer (local/regional), historical dish, homage dish, regional favorite, and regional specialty