Spatula Diaries: Minny’s Chocolate Pie

“When I saw the movie, I said, ‘That’s our chocolate pie,’ ” says Miriam Juban about her reaction to an all-important pie in the movie The Help, a story that reveals the complexities between African-American domestic workers and their white employers in Mississippi in the early 1960s. Juban and business partner Tanya Dillon of the pie company Delight Thyself with Feliciana Delights specialize in Southern pies, available Thursdays and Saturdays at the Red Stick Farmers Market in Baton Rouge. Sitting in a dark theater watching the film unfold, Juban says she recognized the type of chocolate pie featured. Emblematic Southern dishes figure big in the plot, none more so than the chocolate pie for which a maid named Minny is locally famous. Read more about this pie—and its deep, dark, chocolate secret—in this week’s Spatula Diaries.—Maggie Heyn Richardson