In An Arkansas Pie Supper, Robinson swivels from her best known restaurant and recipe subject on modern pie and takes a dive into history. What led her there was barbecue.
“I was researching an upcoming book on the history of barbecue in Arkansas,” says the Little Rock-based journalist. “As I went through hundreds of Arkansas newspapers from more than a century back, I kept noticing that every time I’d read about a barbecue, the same newspaper almost always had recipes for pie. So, along the way, I tucked them back for further research. Within a few months, I had nearly 70 different recipes I longed to try.”
Robinson also found pie recipes from the 1920s in a small collection of cookbooks housed in the University of Arkansas Special Collections, that both informed and added to her list of pies to try.
“Many of the recipes, both in the cookbooks and in the newspaper clippings, had no instructions on how long to bake these pies. Most didn’t have temperatures to bake at, and some were just lists of ingredients. It was going to take some experimentation to recreate them.”
Experimenting took time and effort. It also took ingredients and a place to pull them all together. For the construction of this book, Ben E. Keith Foods graciously donated funds to cover most of the foodstuffs needed to try out the recipes.
Robinson returned to The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, where she previously researched and baked up Arkansas Cookery: Retro Recipes from The Natural State and The Great Arkansas Pie Book. Over the course of three weeks in August 2026, she meticulously worked to recreate the pies. She met both success and failure.
“Many of the recipes just wouldn’t make, despite multiple attempts,” Robinson shares. “I would attempt fillings that would not come together. Sometimes it was a matter of the items within the pies themselves that changed, like dates no longer needing to be pitted before being added to a custard, or a ham not having the much higher salt content it contained a century ago. There were some very frustrating days, working through instructions that were barely there, trying to determine the right temperature and how long each pie should bake.”
The weather was another concern. The temperature in Eureka Springs hit 100 degrees more than half of the days Robinson was in residence, and while climate control in the Colony’s famed Culinary Suite is usually sufficient, there were times when both ovens were baking and the writer was working over a double boiler to bring a filling together, when the temperature in the kitchen exceeded 90 degrees.
“The heat is something cooks from the era would definitely have handled,” Robinson concedes. “Air conditioning at the time might have been an attic fan pulling heat up and out through the house, but there were no HVAC units or window units. Baking was a hot prospect! Many recipes mention letting pies sit overnight; I suspect that’s because some of those pies were baked after the evening meal, when the day was cooler.”
Robinson’s deep dive went beyond the recipes themselves. Within An Arkansas Pie Supper, you’ll find stories about the ingredients themselves: Arkansas’s stature as The Apple State and its varietals that once speckled the national market; the influence of California raisin growers on what is sometimes now called a funeral pie; why coconut and pineapple were both cheap and relatively easy to obtain; and why the pecan pie’s very nature evolved during the 1920s from a cream or meringue filling to the Karo nut pie we best know today.
The name itself comes from a longstanding Arkansas tradition popular in the 1920s, the pie supper, an event where ladies would bring their best pie to auction off for a community fundraiser, where men were encouraged to bid for the pie brought by a young woman they’d like to woo, and where many of the connections made lead to engagements of those couples. The event reached a zenith of popularity in the 1920s, but you’ll still find similar events held today.
An Arkansas Pie Supper, Robinson’s 15th book, will be released in hardcover on November 10, 2026, with a paperback edition to follow in February 2027. The author is currently arranging booksignings across the state. These signings are already on her schedule:
November 14th, 2026
Book signing and meet-and-greet
5:30 – 8 p.m. at the Meet the Artist event
Terra Studios, outside Fayetteville
November 19th, 2026
Author talk and signing
5:30 p.m.
Pope County Library, Russellville
November 28th, 2026
Book signing and meet-and-greet
2-4 p.m. on Small Business Saturday
WordsWorth Books, Little Rock
November 30th, 2026
Author talk, signing, and pie tasting
6 p.m.
Boston Mountain Heritage Society, Mountainburg
December 2, 2026
9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
December 2, 2026
8 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Author booth and signing
Arkansas Farm Bureau Convention, Hot Springs
December 4, 2026
Author book signing and meet-and-greet
11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Leon’s Catfish and More, Pine Bluff
Books can be purchased through retailers nationwide. Signed copies are available through store.tontipress.com. Contact the author at kat@tiedyetravels.com for wholesale orders.
