Sweet success

Most observers thought the General Assembly would be so consumed with passing a balanced two-year budget in the midst of a recession that no other substantive issues would be addressed. Guess all those cynics will now have to eat crow, or, er, well, something else:

The Indiana State Senate this afternoon passed a resolution urging that the sugar cream pie be named the state's official pie.

The resolution, which was approved on a voice vote, does not actually make the sugar cream pie Indiana's official pie. For that legislators would have to pass a state law. Nonetheless, there was plenty of celebrating at the Statehouse.

Most of the stories point out that the sugar cream pie is "like a custard pie, but without the eggs." As perhaps your only correspondent who has had an actual baking class at Ivy Tech, let me elaborate. The part about the eggs is true, but there are a couple of other differences as well.

Custard pies usually call for milk, while sugar cream pies call for whipping cream or half and half. That means, among other things, that for the custard pie you just have to mix all the wet and dry ingredients together and plop them in a pie shell. The sugar cream pie usually involves heating and mixing at least a couple of ingredients in a pot on the stove, so it's a little more work than the custard pie. That's undoubtedly why protesters who throw pies in other people's faces use custard instead of sugar cream -- why go to all that extra work just to make a point?

And then there's the sugar. Most custard pie recipes call for about a third to a half a cup.  Most sugar cream pie recipes I've seen call for anywhere for anywhere from a cup to a cup and two-thirds. So there you go. The sugar cream pie is the perfect state pie for us Hoosier fatties. Dig in!

I hope this has helped those of you struggling to keep complex state issues straight in your head. Next week, if the great pie issue hasn't completely exhausted us, maybe we'll get into abortion, gay marriage, a statewide smoking ban and illegal immigration. Or maybe we'll try to come up with a state nut instead. Any state senator should have an edge.