IN YOUR FACE
CALCULATING PIE
British supermarket giant Tesco works hard to tickle its customers' taste buds, so it was a bit of a blow when the calls started coming--reports that people were actually throwing Tesco products instead of eating them. To its credit, management took this news on the chin--and the nose and the forehead.
"Our checkout staff noticed it first," says Tesco spokesperson Melodie Schuster. "People were buying an extraordinary number of pies. Then the customer service lines lit up with callers asking which of our pies left a better impression." These urgent concerns over the impact of dessert service on dinner guests weren't coming from transatlantic Martha Stewart devotees but from fans of another American export, The Simpsons. It seems the bad behavior of Bart, Homer and, particularly, Krusty the Clown is rubbing off on the Brits.
Realizing that it did not know how well their cream cakes, tarts and open pies worked as projectiles, Tesco decided to do a little ballistics research this past May. The company rented a gym near its headquarters in Cheshunt and draped it with plastic. It marked off distances in feet and had employee volunteers comment on range, coverage and, if on the receiving end, feel. In half a day of testing, they decorated the place with nine kinds of pie. "It was quite fun, actually," Schuster says.
Fun, but also a serious inquiry. "Here in the U.K., we have a law called the Food Safety Act," Schuster explains. "While we certainly are in business to encourage people to eat our pies, if our customers were going to throw them, we had to look into the possibilites of people having an accident."
The tests found some clear winners and losers. For "maximum face-filling coverage," Schuster says, you can't go wrong with the egg custard tart. The lemon meringue holds up well in flight and nicely highlights a good aim with a sticky, yellow smear. Upper-crust pie slingers will appreciate the strawberry and raspberry fruit tarts. "They're a little more expensive, but you do get two to a pack. They fit neatly in the hand, so you can be sneakier," Schuster notes. Pies that will leave egg on the thrower's face include nut pies, which could cause eye injury, and partly frozen gateaux, which would be like flinging a snowball with a rock in it--thoroughly bad form.
Tesco's results compare with earlier work by Buster Keaton et al. The vaudevillian and slapstick movie comedian was reported to be very particular about his pies, which created good visual effects for the big screen but would have been hard to swallow in real life. Keaton had studio bakers cook two crusts until they were brittle, then stick them together with a flour-and-water glue. He found that a double crust kept the pie from crumbling in his hand. (He never used a pie plate for fear of injuring a co-star.) Filling then depended on the target's complexion. Blondes could expect chocolate or blackberries in the mix. Brunettes were stuck with lemon meringue.
Building on Keaton's model, TV comedian Soupy Sales may have achieved the record for pies thrown: 19,000 chucked at last count. He says the crust is the critical point of contact: "You have to have a pie crust that explodes into about a thousand pieces." His show, which creamed the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Shirley MacLaine, ran from 1955 to 1962.
As for further research, Tesco's pie-throwing tests have generated tangential questions. Says Schuster: "We're thinking of putting out a pamphlet about how to get pie stains out of clothes."
--Brenda DeKoker Goodman
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BRENDA DEKOKER GOODMAN, a journalist based in Albuquerque, N.M., does not recommend chicken pot pie.