The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book

An Introduction

Sisters

As siblings, we are very close in age, which makes us practically peers. Growing up in a small midwestern town where we graduated high school with the same fifteen kids we went to elementary school with, we managed to keep a firm sense of independence and to pursue our own interests and friendships (thanks in a large part to a strong mother intent on raising us and our brother, Chris, as self-determined people). Though we shared a bedroom, teachers, basketball coaches, and after-school activities during our school years, we followed very different paths after high school—Emily to New York City and London for art school, and Melissa, after finishing a degree in finance, on an extended work visa journey through Australia and New Zealand—before reconnecting to live together again in an old house in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where we would eventually discover a mutual love for pie baking and turn it into our livelihood.

Family Business

The Calico Kitchen, on Main Street in Hecla, South Dakota (population 230), was our second home as kids; our playground for creativity; our venue for weekend breakfasts, high school lunch breaks, and after-school hangouts; the site of our first job (dishwasher), second job (waitress), and third job (cook); and the backbone of our family life. Founded, owned, and operated by our mother and her sisters, Susan and Anne, the restaurant absolutely defined a community gathering place—serving lunch to the region's farmers, banquets to the local bowling team, meals to the wild game hunters who traveled from afar for the abundant local pheasant- and deer-hunting seasons, coffee to the after-church crowd, and annual prom banquets to the high school students.

Over the years we held family gatherings there—especially when all our aunts, uncles, and cousins made it back to town for a holiday—and the restaurant would be filled to capacity with just family. Mother's Day was one of the biggest days of the year at the Calico and was always a special time to be working together in the kitchen with Mom and our aunts, serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner to our close-knit community of mothers and their families. Every day, it was the norm to be surrounded by hardworking women in white aprons simultaneously handling the grill, the oven, or the fryer; washing the dishes; prepping the potatoes; carving the meat; and, yes, baking the pies. And there was one special woman who baked all those ever-popular pies, our grandmother Liz.

Elizabeth Zastrow was born and raised in our little town of Hecla in the house her parents built. After helping raise her brothers and sisters, she moved to Chicago to work as a nanny, but eventually returned home to care for her mother. She met our grandfather Frank when he came to town with his passel of hunting dogs looking for a place to board; he rented a room in the ample upstairs, which Grandma and her mother maintained as a sort of local inn. Grandma Liz always joked that at thirty years old she was an old maid and never expected to marry. But Frank took a liking to Liz and won her heart and hand in marriage, and within ten years they had seven children, who were also raised in that very same house.

We love to tell the story that our parents, Mary and Ron, met while working for Frohling's Jack & Jill, the local butcher, and it's true; our dad broke down animals and cut the meat, and our mom worked the counter, weighing and wrapping it to order for customers. It should come as little surprise that they would both venture in their early twenties into food-related businesses in their hometown—our mother with her restaurant and our father with his own grain-farming operation, which he started with the help of his mother, Frances, and father, Marvin—both with a true passion and dedication to making their enterprises succeed. It was our father who instilled in us that working for yourself is the only way to go; "make your own raises," he would advise.

The first recipes for Four & Twenty Blackbirds were devised in the kitchen of a turn-of-the-century mansion in Crown Heights, Brooklyn—aka our apartment. After our college years and a few post-college years working, we found ourselves living together again as sisters, sharing a bathroom, a kitchen, and eventually a sky-blue 1990 Toyota Camry wagon.

Having an ample kitchen space in our home to entertain and cook for friends certainly had some influence in fostering our idea of starting a pie company—whenever we planned a dinner party, we tested a new pie or tart recipe. For what is making a recipe without sharing it? The sincere and enduring encouragement of some of our dearest friends was fuel for our fire. It helped us believe in ourselves; it gave us confidence that as self-taught bakers we could make a go of it without a culinary degree or formal training, or a startup budget to speak of.

Why Pie?

The earliest days of our business planning happened at a time when the economy was in a major downturn: Melissa, having graduated with a degree in finance, was able to find only part-time work as a waitress in Brooklyn, while Emily maintained a full-time day job in photography. We would spend any and all spare time planning recipes and trading ideas, deliberating over what to name our company, how to brand it, what sort of identity we wanted it to have, and most important, how to make and sell the most delicious pie in New York City. At the time, we were hard-pressed to find anyone focusing exclusively on pies in a truly handmade way, using seasonal and fresh ingredients sourced from local orchards. Sure, plenty of bakeries made and carried pies, but not pies like ours; and we didn't know of any places in the neighborhoods we frequented that were dedicated exclusively to the experience of sitting down and eating a slice of pie with a cup of coffee. Perhaps such a place existed, but not on our radar, and that is exactly what we wanted to create: a local pie shop.

In the early days of our pie making and baking together, we would take on any variety of baking opportunities that came our way—from food-styling jobs (Christmas cookies in July for QVC or Star Wars–themed birthday cakes for Target) to wedding catering and private parties (Melissa single-handedly made and baked hundreds of gougères in the summer heat in our home oven for a wedding party)—and we have many friends to thank for connecting us with customers and being supportive of our ambitions. Some of our most exciting and challenging projects were for our friends Miranda Lloyd and Eugene Jho, who hosted impressive multicourse dinner parties in their loft in Bushwick. They would devise a highly creative menu of course upon course, along with cocktails and wines, and then ask us to create a pie or tart dessert that worked with the meal. It was inspiring in the most wonderful way and laid the groundwork for us to build confidence in serving our product to complete strangers. We would prepare the dessert at home, drive it over to their place midparty, sneak in, plate, and serve. We quickly came to realize that one of the most valuable parts of this experience was getting to talk with the guests about what they liked and didn't like in our recipes.

Throughout this time, we knew our pies were our strongest suit, and that which inspired us most. By the time Thanksgiving of 2009 rolled around, we found ourselves with a slew of pie orders to make just for friends and family, with the promise that they would be hand-delivered straight from our home kitchen.

Spotting a storefront for rent on the corner of Third Avenue and Eighth Street is what really spurred the leap from home kitchen to our own brick- and-mortar space. Our ambitions and expectations for our pie shop were very simple: to create a gathering place to support and serve our community with really good pie and coffee—both of us knowing well from our upbringing and the way we like to eat that quality and execution of product are far more important than being trendy or cashing in on a passing fad, and that substance over simply sugar is what keeps customers coming back.

The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Shop

We signed the lease for our pie shop location on New Year's Eve with a blue moon in the sky overhead. With the help of friends, we started demolition the very next day, January 1, 2010, tearing down layers of dirty old plaster, outdated ceiling board, and old plastic flooring to reveal the true character of our space: original tin walls and hardwood flooring, a classic Brooklyn look. We had to design and rebuild the entire place to be perfect for pie baking and pie eating. Our talented, carpentry-savvy friends Inez Valk-Kempthorne and Justus Kempthorne helped us every step of the way. We wanted ample seating and a visible open kitchen for our customers to see what's going on in the back. After three months of hard work, we opened our doors to the public in April of 2010, and that's when we really began to understand what the pie business was all about.

To say our kitchen space is small would be an understatement. It is, however, efficient, and our one convection oven works as hard as we do. In the early days, we would bake until late in the night, oftentimes well past one in the morning, only to be back in at five a.m. to bake the morning pastry—including our Egg in a Nest and Blackbird's Bread—and open our doors for our eager neighborhood customers. We very naively thought we could do everything ourselves at least for the first couple of weeks, but quickly realized that was entirely impossible and we needed to hire some help. Now, years later, we have a small but highly talented group of pie and pastry makers who take what they do very seriously and care deeply about making the best products possible. Our kitchen team, baristas, and dishwashers, are the backbone of the experience our customers have at the shop, and we couldn't run our place without each and every one of them.