Hubig's pies

How can you wrong for $.89?

The New Yorker
April 16, 2007
New Orleans Journal: The Pie Men
Dan Baum

Hubig's pies cost eighty-nine cents apiece, and can be found at almost every cash register in southeast Louisiana. New Orleanians adore these packaged, deep-fried pies, endlessly debating the merits of the lemon filling versus the apple, or whether the pies should be eaten microwaved or cold. Some locals even dress up as Hubig's pies for Mardi Gras.

During our first two months here, Margaret and I ignored the Hubig's pie. We wrote off its popularity as the irrationality of hometown allegiance; we never understood Atlantans' affection for the Varsity hot-dog stand, or Cincinnati's love of Skyline chili, either. We assumed that Hubig's pies were made in some vast, soulless
factory from the cheapest imaginable ingredients. The building on Dauphine Street that we rode our bikes past every day, the one with a big neon sign, was, we figured, a distribution point, a downtown office, or a cute condo complex that retained the old insignia...

Gradually, it dawned on us that this was the actual factory, and we grew intrigued. Commerce has been largely banished from American residential areas, and industry almost completely. It's the rare American factory worker who can walk to work.

Otto Ramsey, one of the owners, gave us a tour of the cement-block bakery, which Simon Hubig opened in 1927. (The company is owned by the son and the nephew of the men who bought into the company in the nineteen-forties and fifties.) Hubig's cooks all its fillings, mostly from actual produce evaporated apples, fresh-frozen strawberries and cherries, whole raw sweet potatoes in the fall and buys locally as much as it can. (Much to Ramsey's regret, Hubig's makes do with canned peaches and pineapples.) The company now uses liquid corn sugar in addition to cane, but otherwise its recipes haven't changed. Hubig's dough is made with ninety-nine-per-cent animal fat. "We've got the trans fats down to 0.65 per cent," Ramsey said proudly.

A single, clankety machine turns out all the pies between seventy-five and seventy-eight a minute. A wizened man hand-loaded balls of dough into a hopper. A long sheet emerged onto a conveyor underneath, and the machine folded these around dollops of filling and then cut and pressed them into pies. Lined up in echelons of ten, the pies entered a fryer for four minutes before passing under a curtain of icing.

After cooling on a towering multi-level carrousel, they slid down a ramp, and a worker fed them onto a belt. "Time from fill to bag, two hours," Ramsey said. The wrappers are stamped with a date one week hence, at which point they are retrieved from stores and destroyed.

Ramsey has invested more than the family fortune in these high-calorie snacks. He started telling us about the cold-storage company that had warehoused the ingredients before Katrina, and had done so for generations; overwhelmed with sadness, he had to stop. "I'm sorry," he muttered, as he struggled to collect himself. When we asked later how his employees had gotten back to work after the storm, his voice caught again and tears ran down from under his glasses. "I don't know how they did it," he said quietly. "Some of them had lost everything. Yet when we needed them they were here." Ramsey lightened the mood by giving us a Hubig's lemon pie from the carrousel; it was still warm. We told several locals about this, and their eyes grew wide with envy.

After the tour, Ramsey's son Andrew came down from the upstairs office to meet us. Andrew is a burly young man who attended the New Orleans Police Academy so he could volunteer as a reserve cop. (The night before, he said, he'd arrested a man wanted for beating his wife.)

Seven Hubig's vans, nearly half the fleet, were lost in the flood, Andrew said. One van, which had arrived a week before Katrina and hadn't been paid for yet, ended up five miles away in St. Bernard Parish, overturned and caked in mud. Hubig's has been buying vans from the same dealer for the past twenty-five years, Andrew explained. "I called him up when we were getting ready to reopen and had to say, 'Not only can't we pay you for the brand-new van you just delivered to us but we need two more and can't pay for those, either.'" He stopped, an odd smile frozen on his face, trying not to burst into tears. "And you know what he said?" He paused again, lip quivering. "He said, 'What color?'"