About That $80 Blueberry Pie

I subscribe in hard copy to two magazines, Reason (where I’m a sometime contributor) and New York. The latter runs features in its digital vertical The Cut that occasionally drive me bonkers (and make for good conversation fodder on the Smoke ‘Em pod), but for the most part the mag is solid, with several crack feature writers (Kerry Howley, Brock Colyar,) and a splashy layout that makes it fun to read. It also for my money has the best food coverage in NYC.

Because I moved last month, the Summer 2026 issue just caught up to me. It’s all about the excesses of the Hamptons, a location I assume needs no explanation. I’m as titillated as the next person by the heiress recluse’s sad last days and photos of the cliffside Montauk home of the late photographer Richard Avedon (who shot me in 1984). As for Hamptons food, the “What Everyone Is Talking About” round-up will I guess be useful if I find myself in Sag Harbor wanting a Waygu hot dog.

Two pages later, I was confronted with an image that made me very happy—note the name of this Substack—and as for paying $80 for a pie, whatever, Hamptons people gonna Hampton. Good for the baker who’s raking in the dough (…), and let’s hope the pie itself has a buttery crumb and a filling that’s deep and not too sweet and so scrumptious you find yourself scraping the last bits of it from the tin wth your fingers.

But then I read the copy, and started to take umbrage on behalf of the pie, started to see how it was being conscripted as the next status item. “In a region where entertaining can be a blood sport, bringing a coveted dessert to your host is de rigueur” wrote the author, and went on to list the various pies, their prices, their pedigrees. Who needs a tennis bracelet when you can buy a $45 apple pie in the bakery owned by the wife of the CEO of Blackstone?

This is pie as emissary, for which I might take some delight; go, little pie, go! But I did not take delight because said pie hawkers are pushing things about pie that are just not true.

“Baking requires expensive equipment and knowledgable chefs,” said one fancy food store owner, which you might believe if you do not do any baking, and sure, there are a sunk costs that go into running a business, on top of production costs. Nevertheless, striking a “Don’t try this at home!” tone seems to me a hedge against the home baker making the $65 raspberry-pistachio tart herself and realizing it costs less than $12.

Yes, I understand needing to make a profit, which I do not begrudge at all, but do not do it by lying about pie. She is an open-handed girl, very forgiving; she feeds everyone and she does it on the cheap. Will a pie you bake with ingredients from CostCo taste as good as the one made with the “$25 nine-ounce jars of low-sugar preserves” sold at “a twee Hamptons shop”? One way to find out.

I should just laugh at all this, at the ridiculousness of East Hamptonites scraping it out to “grab one of the limited-edition salted blueberry pies.”

But then I got to a part of the story that is pure gaslighting.

For those uninterested in status desserts, there’s always the old-fashioned approach — bake it yourself. But personal chef Robyn Henderson-Diederiks offers a word of caution. The pies she makes for her clients using local farm-stand produce and good-quality flour and butter can cost up to $120 in ingredients alone, and that’s before her fee kicks in. Adding up her shopping list, she says, “It might be cheaper to buy the $80 pie.”

No, no, absolutely not, none of that is true. A really good organic flour, like “Farm to People,” will run you $6.29 for two pounds, or enough to make three pie crusts, or about $2 a crust. I have become addicted to good French butter, and while I hesitate to bake with it because of the price, let’s say I did. That will run you about $10 for 8.8 ounces, which is just about what you need for one crust.

The only other ingredients you will need are salt, sugar—whose price can vary from $1 pound to $6, so let’s split it and put your two cups of sugar costs you $4. The blueberries are the biggest variable, and you are going to need to two pints, or $10? Add a few spices, maybe some vanilla, an egg wash and you’re at another $1. That’s $27 at the high end. I am telling you, I bake blueberry pies, and many of them, for about $8 a pie.

A salted blueberry tart may be this season’s must-have accessory; next year it will be something else (remember the cronut?). But pie? She is not going anywhere, she is available to you any time, she will let you mess around with her in the kitchen, all you need is a little flour and an hour and the desire to feed people, the pleasures of which are immeasurable. Thank you pie, ping for recipes.

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