
by Chris Jay
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Pie.
Just seeing the word, written out on the page, has a sort of psychopharmacological effect on me. Some scholars who study the ancient language of Sanskrit believe that reading or chanting certain Sanskrit phrases can actually improve circulation and brain health in the reader. When I see or hear the word “pie,” something that’s wound too tightly inside of me loosens up just a bit.
Pie is for a morning off of work with nowhere to be. Pie is for lingering over a meal longer than planned (maybe I’ll have a cup of coffee, too, please). Having pie in a restaurant is more than a rare treat, it is a meditation. I have never gotten into an argument while eating pie. I have never taken a first forkful of cold, tart lemon custard topped with mile-high meringue on a graham cracker crust and thought: “I had better check Twitter.”
Having pie is a state of mind. When I have pie, I am with pie, and the outside world must wait.
Pie, in other words, has no politics. If the owner of a pie shop chooses to wade into the fray of political theatre by, for example, suing their local mayor over the fact that he’s required their waitresses to wear masks and seat customers six feet apart, that is their right. This is America, and Americans are free to make ourselves look as dumb as we’d like. But any business that chooses to force its politics down the throats of consumers must surely understand that some of those consumers will take their business elsewhere.
Back in mid-July, I drove past our local pie shop. I considered the banner that hung above the front entrance: FREE LOUISIANA NOW!
Free us from what, exactly? Free us from wearing a mask in public so we won’t inadvertently cause the death of a grandmother who raised the gas station clerk that sells us an ICEE every Monday? Free us from having to be seated six feet apart while dining on patios?
Anyone who equates being asked to wear a mask with the loss of personal liberty has never known a single moment of actual oppression.
When I got home from my drive, I sat down and opened Facebook and—lo and behold—found that I wasn’t the only person who’d lost their taste for Shreveport’s favorite strawberry icebox pie.
Brittany Shaw runs a small, home-based bakery called Caked By Britt. She was feeling the same way that I was feeling, and she’d decided to do something about it.
“They made their values and stance very clear,” Shaw wrote me via Facebook Messenger. As a working mother and small business owner, she had not been able to find the time for a phone interview, though we’d attempted to connect several times.
“As a woman, as a Black woman, a Black woman in the working class and a mom, I cannot continue to support a business that does not align with my values,” she wrote. “So yes, I wanted to give our community and our allies another option that aligns with our moral and ethical values.”


Caked By Britt set out to craft a better strawberry icebox pie, one that wouldn’t require her to turn a blind eye to the fact that communities of color are being hit disproportionately hard by COVID-19. In the U.S., Black and brown people are twice as likely as white people to die of COVID-19. In Louisiana, where the racial disparity is much worse, Black people are three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as white people.*
She also wanted to create something better-tasting, something that felt less artificial on the tongue, and something that honored the tradition of Southern icebox pie. Strawberry icebox pie, in particular, is the perfect summertime sweet for Louisiana. A true icebox pie requires no baking at all, meaning that the pie-maker doesn’t have to heat up the kitchen.
Louisiana grows some of the finest strawberries in the world, and many of the strawberries sold in local groceries are grown by Louisianians in Tangipahoa and Livingston parishes, an area that farmers call “the Berry Belt.”
“I want you to get all of the flavor in each bite from the strawberries, and not the gooey extra stuff,” Shaw said.
Not quite all of the flavor in her pie comes from strawberries. Shaw’s fantastic crust is a true no-bake crust, a “pressed crust” that I believe must begin life as some sort of crisp, almond-flavored cookie or biscuit like Archway Windmill Cookies. I floated this theory past Shaw, but she would neither confirm nor deny my suspicions.
“You’re pretty close,” she wrote.
Most icebox pies are topped with cool, velvety whipped cream, another reason why they’re a perfect dessert for the dog days of summer. Shaw’s strawberry whipped cream has been perfected over many French toast breakfasts with her family, which is about to grow with the addition of her second child, a daughter.
“I’m not a whipped cream eater, but I could sit and eat this for days,” she wrote.
It is a beautiful, by-the-book whipped cream with a special added ingredient that takes it over the top. I believe it contains just a hint of strawberry-flavored powdered drink mix. And if that doesn’t sound delicious to you, I can’t help you.

“The flavors of the strawberries, mixed with the crust and the light, homemade, strawberry whipped cream seem to do a little dance in your mouth,” Shaw wrote.
That’s a perfect description of this pie: it dances. It dances in the sunshine that fattened the berries, the cool whipped cream greeting your tongue like the first blast of air conditioning when you come inside from the August heat.
Best of all, Caked By Britt’s excellent strawberry icebox pie doesn’t ask me to look upon 165,000 (and counting) dead Americans—moms and grandmothers, brothers and sisters, caregivers and first responders, sons and daughters, husbands and wives—and see the loss of their precious lives as an inconvenience.
How to Order
Caked By Britt’s strawberry icebox pies are $25 each and may be ordered by messaging the Caked By Britt Facebook page. Shaw asks for eight days’ notice on pie orders, as Caked By Britt is still a one-woman show and she’s very pregnant at the moment.
*Using data collected through August 4, 2020, American Public Media Group found that white Louisianians had a COVID-19 mortality rate of 60 per 100,000. Black Louisianians had a COVID-19 mortality rate of 178 per 100,000. This is the sixth-largest racial disparity among COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. See the full report.
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How do I love this? Let me count the ways …
ah, (quoting the fabulous Gilda Radner as Emily Litella), “Never mind!”
Your writing is as delicious as I imagine Ms. Shaw’s pies to be, and that’s saying something!
Thanks, Chris, for a tasty respite from an otherwise cracker-dry day (term used advisedly).
Thank you, Sylvia! Thanks for all of the support you have shown us over the years!