‘People came to blows’: The race to buy a pie for Thanksgiving in New York

Last week, Donald Trump pardoned a turkey, JFK airport queues snaked out the terminal doors, and bomb squads lined the Macy’s Parade route round Central Park.

It was my first Thanksgiving in America – and I had the best invitation of all time. Having made friends in (literal) high places, I was due to attend an all-day celebration (from pumpkin spice liqueur coffees and bagels at 8am all the way through to turkey and cranberries in the evening) at one of the most exclusive addresses in New York City, directly overlooking the parade of gigantic balloons and waving celebrities on pilgrim-themed floats that snakes through Manhattan first thing in the morning on the last Thursday of November.

Halfway through the day, we were scheduled to do a traditional “turkey trot” (read: slow walk) round Central Park to shore up our appetite for dinner and dessert. My fiancé and I couldn’t have been more excited. There was just one thing we were tasked with doing: bringing the pie.

Getting the pie would be simple, we reasoned. There are a lot of bakeries local to us in Brooklyn, including a store that literally only does pies called, appropriately enough, Miss American Pie. Still, we weren’t going to turn up to such a party unprepared. To make sure we had enough time to collect the traditional dessert, we went down to Miss American Pie at 8am – opening time – on Wednesday morning, before work.

What we found there was chaos. “What do you want?” a woman surrounded by 200 pie boxes said to us as we entered, wiping sweat off her brow as she piled another batch of pastries into a large open oven. Her colleague was leaning over the counter, panting, hair plastered to her face.

“We… were wondering if you might have a Thanksgiving pie,” I stammered, as my six-foot-three fiancé cowered behind me. “Thanksgiving pie orders closed weeks ago,” we were informed. “If you want to join the orphan pie line, you can come back again at 2pm.”

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The orphan pie line is the line of people too foolish to order their own pie in advance, who are hoping to buy a pastry someone else ordered in advance then failed to ever pick up. There is, of course, no guarantee that there will be any orphan pie. My fiancé took the day to work from home and we crossed our fingers.

At 1.30pm, I called him to remind him. “Get down to Miss American Pie now!” I cried into the handset, with the fervour of a newly converted pie fanatic.

“Do you think I would have forgotten?!” he replied. “I’m standing in the orphan pie line already. I’ve been here for ages. There are two guys ahead of me, and they just came to blows over who got there first.”

It was a tense 45 minutes as the final stragglers came in to get their pre-orders, sectioned off from the motley crew of orphan pie hopefuls (which now numbered more than 20). I ate my lunch in fearful silence in the office, before a message lit up on my phone: “I got it. Pumpkin.”

A pumpkin pie, the king of Thanksgiving desserts! We rejoiced. We put it in the fridge with a shelf all to itself lest anything disturb it. We carried it on the subway in the morning slowly and carefully (I wasn’t allowed to carry it down the street, because I have a history of tripping over nonexistent hazards).

When we arrived at Columbus Circle in Manhattan at the crack of dawn, we manoeuvred through the crowds jostling against barriers for a good position to watch the parade with the pie held aloft, like an offering to the gods of Thanksgiving. Few could appreciate what we had gone through to win that crumbly orange dessert. This pie, orphaned then adopted, was more precious to us that day than anything we could have imagined.

At 8pm, after the turkey had been served alongside some of the frankly bizarre traditional Thanksgiving sides (sweet potato casserole with marshmallows, anyone?), the pie came out and people converged upon it. Having been previously sceptical about root vegetables in candied contexts, I wolfed a slice of it down with relish. It was delicious. Victory tasted so sweet.

At the end of the night, our pie was the only one which had been entirely consumed (and not only by us, I swear). We looked upon that empty pastry dish with exhausted satisfaction.

Next year, we’ll get our orders in early.