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[title]We eat with our eyes first—but that’s not feasible for all folks. So when you step inside Maya-Camille Broussard’s midcentury-inspired pie shop on the South Side of Chicago, you’ll first be greeted by her mother, who’s happy to verbally run down the entire menu for those straining to see it. Counters and coat racks come in multiple heights to accommodate wheelchair users and little people, and braille signage and penny tile flooring benefit customers with limited sight.
Broussard, herself a member of the deaf and hard of hearing community, set out to make sure Justice of the Pies could offer a bit of joy to everyone—particularly her neighbors. The James Beard finalist baker (who you may recognize from Netflix’s Bake Squad) opened her brick-and-mortar pie and quiche shop along 87th Street, considered to be a blighted corridor due to its lack of food options.
For Broussard, food insecurity is personal. Her father, the son of an alcoholic, grew up hungry in the projects on the West Side of Chicago. That trauma stuck—and inadvertently passed down to Maya-Camille. She remembers back in the fourth grade when her father, a lawyer, was stuck in court all day. She opened the fridge to nothing but condiments and a fresh jar of olives, while she cracked open the freezer to find some frozen chicken. But Broussard didn’t know what to do with that chicken and instead downed the full jar of olives, only to break out in a hideous rash from the intense salt intake.
“When I thought about it as an adult, I said, ‘You know what? If I had the wherewithal to take that chicken out of the freezer, defrost it even in the microwave, throw some salt and pepper on it and just sauté it—it would not have been the most amazing chicken meal, but I would have been temporarily satiated.’”
That’s how I Knead Love was born, a series of workshops run out of Broussard’s bakery (Justice of the Pies is actually named in honor of her late father) that teaches Chicago school kids from lower-income communities how to be self-sufficient in the kitchen. “I am not able to save world hunger,” she says. “But what I do have is the skill set and the knowledge to show kids how to make simple, easy-to-make meals, and the basics of how to hold a knife, how to use a spatula or how to safely turn on a stove top.”
What she also has: pie. Delicious, delicious pie. We spoke with Broussard about some of her essential holiday tips for budding bakers, why ASL should dethrone PSL and how her culinary career has been a natural fit for giving back.
Why is pie so good?
It’s the food of the people. When you go around the world and you experience foods from different cultures, you will find that the people’s food is always encased in a crust, whether it’s an empanada or even a taquito, or beef patties and coco bread. It’s something that is easy to carry and day laborers will be able to walk to work and eat at the same time and fuel their body.
So, I love the concept of pies because, one, it is very humble, but also there is not the type of expectation that it has to be beautifully presented in a way that is very high art. A pie can have filling spilling out of it—bubbling—and people would think that it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. You don’t try to control the aesthetic of a pie but rather you appreciate what became of the pie when it comes out of the oven.
I remember as a kid when my grandma would make her chocolate pudding pie and I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Did you have any kind of moment like that with dessert as a kid?
Not with pies. I did have moments with treats as a kid, but it actually stemmed from me being an athlete. Every Saturday my dad taught scuba diving classes. I would be stuck in the pool all day, and that led to me being a student athlete and swimming. When I went to swim meets, it was the first time that I was introduced to bake sale tables… I’d never had a Rice Krispies Treat until I went to a swim meet. And then I became obsessed with it, and I asked my mom to buy me some Rice Krispies Cereal and marshmallows because, as a physician, my mom was not about to have all of this sugar in her house.
Even now I’m obsessed with Rice Krispies Treats—like, let it have the right amount of salt, instead of just using butter, let’s brown the butter and make it real nutty. You know, let’s have fun with it. I grew up eating classic Southern baked desserts… but for me, those were the kind of desserts you ate around the holidays or for a special occasion. Whereas when I went to the swim meet that was every week. Like, “oh, I could have a brownie every week as long as I burn off the calories.” So that was my first introduction to an everyday dessert.
Was there a specific moment where you thought, oh, I’m very good at this?
I always made brownies, and I would take it out of the oven. I would put it on top of the stove so that it could settle—I like to bake it just a little under because I love the gooey, sort of lava cake consistency of the middle, but then baking it long enough to where you have a little bit of a crispy edge. I would go upstairs, and I would take a shower or read a Babysitter’s Club book, and then I would come back downstairs and the pan of brownies would be nearly gone. And of course, I would be livid, but my ego was also stroked like, “yeah, it was pretty good—okay, now keep your hands off of it.”
What do you think makes food, and pie specifically, such a natural fit for social justice causes?
Years ago I contributed to a cookbook called Feed the Resistance by Julia Turshen. And when I looked at a lot of the recipes, it has to be something that you can carry somewhere. Most people think of pies being in a nine-inch pie pan, but it’s also something you could put in a baking dish. It’s something that you can share with people—and even make it relatively inexpensive. It’s humble food not just because it’s handheld, but usually it’s made with ingredients that are accessible.
So when I think about fighting food insecurities, I’m thinking about what kind of healthy meals can you make, and make it in high quantities in the way that Feed the Resistance was really focusing on. What kind of recipes are out there that could feed a large amount of people who are fighting the system, so to speak? And when I think about pies, I think about how it’s something that can easily be shared.
What are some of your personal holiday traditions?
I know everyone’s celebrating Thanksgiving Day, but I love the idea of also including Indigenous Foods Day. If you go to our website, it says Thanksgiving preorder, but under each description of the pies, we say it can be picked up on Thanksgiving Day slash Indigenous Foods Day.
But ever since I’ve had the business, I tend to just sleep in on Thanksgiving Day. My mother is a retired physician, and I grew up with her being in the hospital most Thanksgivings, so we always catered. Sometimes we would just eat it the night before… and then we would do something like go to the movies.
But at my father’s house—my parents were divorced—one tradition that we always had was eating gumbo. My dad’s family is from Louisiana, and I never had turkey over there. It was always gumbo.
Are there any seasonal treats—ones you eat or prepare or both—that you particularly look forward to this time of year?
So I am not a fan of pumpkin—that’s a very well-known secret—and I always say, why are we doing PSL when ASL is right there? I love apple spice. Right now we’ve got a caramel apple spice cake, which is similar to a carrot cake, but it’s made with apples and then we do a caramel frosting on the outside. I have apple cider bread pudding. I have an apple cider soft-serve. I have a caramel apple crumble cake. So, I’m all about the apple season right now. And we typically do that through the end of December.
Baking for the holidays can be very stressful. How would you encourage folks to relax while they bake?
I pre-make as much as possible and put it in the freezer. Even at the bakery, we start making our sweet potato filling in October and we’re freezing it. So anything that is like a filling—especially for pies, because pies have a high water retention—it does really well in the freezer. You can freeze crust for 30 days. There are some things you can’t freeze, like cornbread filling—the batter. Don’t freeze that. Macaroni—don’t freeze that.
Also, where are the shortcuts? In my household, we love canned cranberries. Are you going to try to make homemade cranberry sauce when you have the canned Ocean Spray cranberries that you could just slice up—which is amazing, by the way.
I know most households will do the desserts the night before or even two days before and then just forbid anyone from eating it. But I would say examine your menu and decide what can be made well in advance so that you’re not stressed and overwhelmed on the day of.
If you’re the kind of person who’s only ever hit buttons on a microwave, is there a recipe that you like to suggest as a good starting pie?
I do a petite s’more pie. It’s like a lava cake and a chocolate pie in one, and you can make it for just one person or two. It’s just graham cracker crust and chocolate—put it in a ramekin and you can make it in that and just eat it directly out of there. You have your graham cracker crust, you have your warm gooey filling, you can put a marshmallow on top. You’re not spending one or two hours trying to get it done, you can do it in 20 minutes.
“You don’t need a whole dollar to make change, you just need 10 cents.”
What other community-minded plans do you have on the horizon?
I woke up a couple of days ago thinking about the news of the SNAP benefits being taken away [at the time of this interview]. My dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor while I was [a grad student] at Northwestern, and I was in my early 20s and I’m his only child. I didn’t have the capacity to care for a parent that had a brain tumor that had to stop working. So we had to apply for EBT benefits for him. And so I carried the EBT card for years so that I could buy him groceries. And it’s just really sad about how people think that it’s just people who are trying to live off of the government, but it’s elderly people that benefit from it. It’s people living with disabilities that benefit from these public services.
And so I was thinking, okay, I’m super busy right now, I own a business that has a small profit margin—I really don’t have time to raise money. But what can I do? And I was thinking I’m just going to make a really, really big pot of soup, and just make a Reel and tell people, if you have an EBT card, show up and we’ll give you some soup. Is it a whole meal? No. But it’s something that’s warm and hot and inviting for today.
I think that sometimes people think you have to do something grand and ambitious in order to make an impact. And it’s really just the small moments that you take care to put thought into and to put labor into that really matter. You know, you can make change—you don’t need a whole dollar to make change, you just need 10 cents. You really can do a lot with just a little.