With 47 books under his belt, it’s a wonder Roy Blount, Jr. can dish out another helping, but Blount is always ready with a serving of his special brand of eclectic linguistic hijinks, and Save Room for Pie has plenty and to spare. In this jaunt to the center ring, Blount takes on food, and as a native of Decatur, Georgia, his take has a decidedly Southern perspective.
Blount’s prose is riddled with non-sequiturs, often to the point of distraction; in fact, the entire work is a hodge-podge of anecdotes, stories involving food and the many celebrities with whom he has rubbed elbows (who are legion), light verse and sidebars. We shouldn’t expect a humorist to give us anything resembling a straight-forward narrative, and Blount not only meets but surpasses these expectations, which can be wearying in a work spanning 280 pages.
Not to say that Blount isn’t entertaining; he takes on dietary guidelines and healthy eating with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. “Inside every thin Southern person,” he claims, “is a fat person signaling to get out.” He states that Velveeta has “more protein and fewer bad fats than many real cheeses” (being made of whey), and says that he has heard good things “from authorities recognized by my wife” about watermelon, egg yolk, cane syrup, lard, oysters, beef (“if raised right”), whiskey hot peppers, coffee, (dark) chocolate and butter.
His light verse covers such subjects as hamburgers, grease, eggs, gumbo, “love apples” (tomatoes), grits, catsup, “A Dark Sweetness” (cane syrup) and of course peaches. Among the more entertaining essays are on gizzards (“”The gizzard is what a chicken has instead of teeth.”), “Mississippi Music Notes” (“Did I mention that ‘Put Down the Duckie’ is the greatest music video ever made?”) and “Eating Out of House and Home” (“I’ll tell you what’s good though. Baked beans without a fly in them.”), though many of the others are just as rife with Blount’s own brand of lightly sardonic humor.
Admittedly, I am not a great fan of Blount’s writing; I prefer his off-the-cuff performances on NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, but while with Save Room for Pie Blount loads the plate with a lot of superfluous sides (earthworms and professional bass fishing, for instance), the book is a great addition to any fan’s library, a light-hearted jaunt through Southern foodways, a worthy read if only to discover that Mary Hartwell Howorth puts lawn clippings in her pimento cheese.
