Q & A with Four and Twenty Blackbirds’ Melissa and Emily Elsen

The sisters behind Brooklyn’s favorite pie shop, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, have baking in their genes.   While growing up in South Dakota, Melissa and Emily Elsen learned the craft from their Grandma Liz, who baked all the pies for their family’s restaurant in South Dakota.  She taught the Elsen sisters the importance of using seasonal, fresh fruit and the secrets to a phenomenal crust.  Our favorites are the caramel apple pie with a thick, sea-salt studded crust and pear ginger pie. 

Brooklyn may be thousands of miles from South Dakota, but the Elsen sisters kept their grandmother’s lessons close when they began running a pie business out of their Crown Heights apartment. They opened their shop this past year and got immediate praise from the New York Times for their take on this classic American dessert.  Melissa and Emily’s pies feature the freshest fruits of each season and cleverly combine sweet and savory flavors to create pies like strawberry with balsamic vinegar and salted caramel apple.  “To us pie isn’t just a dessert, it’s a hearty treat, an afternoon snack, a sustenance food,” the sisters explain.

Melissa and Emily have been pretty busy lately thanks to Four and Twenty Blackbirds’ rapidly growing popularity, but they still find time to experiment with new pies. And when they aren’t taste testing their own desserts, they’re enjoying artisanal ice cream from Van Leeuwen, another Brooklyn sweets spot.

What did you want to be when you grew
up?
Melissa – All kinds of things . . . making pie suits me for now.

Emily – In elementary school, an astronaut. In high
school, either a musician or an artist.

You both grew up in South Dakota, what
compelled you to move to New York?
Melissa – I spent two years abroad post-college, but didn’t have a plan for when I returned. There was a room opening up in Emily’s apartment, so I thought I’d give New York a shot.  Emily- I came to Brooklyn in 1999 to study Sculpture at Pratt, where I eventually got my BFA. I visited schools in Manhattan too, but I immediately fell in love with Brooklyn. I felt it was the place I had to be. I went to London for a little while, but have always felt like Brooklyn was home. Use seasonal, fresh fruit. 

You learned to make pies from your grandmother. What are some of the most important baking techniques she taught the two of you?  
Enjoy what you are doing and take your time (when you

can!). The pie will be better with love and attention. Don’t overwork your crust.

Did you always get along as kids?
We did get along. We were pretty independent, and maybe we weren’t “best friends” even though we are close in age, but
we definitely respected and cared for each other.

Do you stick mostly to her recipes, or have you changed and adapted them at all. If so, how?
We have adapted, but kept the same basic concept of fresh, in-season fruits in the Spring, Summer and early Fall, and creams, custards and chocolates in the Winter. Grandma Liz used lard in her crusts, and we use
just butter – for us, it’s a flavor and texture thing. Lard is great for savory pies though!

Your family owned a restaurant.  What was the menu like there and is still serving food?  
Our mother and her sisters owned and operated the Calico Kitchen in Hecla, South Dakota from 1985 to 2001. The menu was classic Midwestern family style – full breakfast, lunch and dinner, and very unpretentious. For most of their business years they were the only place in town (the population was around 400 people), but they were well known around the county as a place to get a great meal. There were always big pots on the stove and roaster pans in the oven filled with something delicious. They were all self taught, or learned from Grandma. And they really knew how to cook
everything well and with fresh ingredients like meatloaf, beef roasts and mashed potatoes, fried chicken, steak, hamburgers, potato salad, cole slaw, fresh soups, amazing cinnamon rolls, cookies, and of course, Grandma Liz made
all the pies.

Tell us a little about how you started baking pies in Brooklyn. Did you ever think pies weren’t “trendy” enough to be a successful business?
We started baking together when Melissa moved to Brooklyn in 2009.  Emily had been living here for almost 10 years. We had fantasized for a long time about going into business together but always said “no food!” because we knew how much hard physical work it can be.  Despite that, Melissa had done a number of wedding cakes for her friends and Emily had been baking pies, tarts and cakes for friends as gifts. We started out focusing on pies and tarts because we were both interested in the creative potential of them – and we wanted to make a really good crust – because, that’s the real challenge of good pie! We created a menu of things we wanted to make and tried it from home, selling to friends and friends of friends. The positive response to our products, and the genuine encouragement from close friends gave us the
confidence to say, hey, maybe we should really do this.  We never thought about pie being “trendy”. It was gratifying to us to create a good product that people liked, trendy or not. For our shop, we really just wanted to create an
awesome neighborhood spot where people would want to hang out and eat good pie and coffee, meet friends, have a business meeting, meet new people, what have you . The area we opened our place in needed that, and it makes us incredibly happy to see that developing in the shop.

Before you even opened up an actual shop, you were baking from your apartment.  We heard you even made a “wedding pie.”  
We made tarts for a close friend’s wedding recently (but that was after the shop was open). They requested Chili Chocolate Tarts. We asked our talented friend Ben Cohen to make custom tiers out of traditional
tart pans so that we could create a tiered tart “wedding cake”. We also catered a friend’s wedding this month in
Western Massachusetts.  We made a variety of seasonal fruit pies and tarts with blackberries, plums, pears, peaches, rhubarb, blueberries and nectarines, and we are excited to make pies for some new customers who are getting married in the Fall as well.  You can see it on our website here: www.birdsblack.com. .

Were you overwhelmed by all the publicity following the article in The New York Times?
We feel so blessed and lucky for all the positive press we have received. We were certainly not expecting it, and yes, we have been scrambling to keep up and we couldn’t be happier about it. We are doing our best to increase our production and grow our business in a positive way.

There seems to be a distinct balance between sweet & savory among all your pies, such as strawberry and balsamic vinegar or the salted caramel apple pie.  Was that always important to you in baking?
We do aim to strike a balance with savory ingredients that add subtle aromatic notes that enhance the fruits we use.
Neither of us are big into sugary foods or overly sweetened things – though some of our pies are pretty sweet!  But, to us pie isn’t just a dessert, it’s a hearty treat, an afternoon snack, a sustenance food. It’s great for a breakfast
treat too. We are working on savory pies now and hope to have a menu soon of
lunch and dinner-worthy pies.

Your pie menu changes with each season, so what’s your favorite time of year for pie?  And what’s your favorite pie from that season?
Summer! Because of all the wonderful fruits, but we don’t really play favorites. The best pie is pie that is made
with in season, fresh fruit. Though some of our custards are pretty tasty too: Buttermilk Chess, Grapefruit Custard, Lemon Chess, Salty Honey.

Any new types pies in the works that aren’t already on your seasonal menus?
We are often experimenting with new things and
offering them in the shop if we feel they are up to par.  We’ll add them to the
menu once we’ve had a good response. 

Other than your bakery, do you sell pies to any restaurants or specialty shops?
No, not yet, but we’d like to one day.

New Yorkers finally seem to be embracing regional, American comfort foods foods, like fried chicken,
barbecue and, of course, pies. 
We believe that food that brings to mind the best meals one ate at home and growing up leaves a very powerful
impression. Having been raised in a family restaurant, and with a father that is a farmer who grows corn, wheat, soybeans and more, food was a very important part of our family’s livelihood. We learned that simple, humble, yet delicious
and fresh food is what we crave for sustenance. We think it’s natural, and exciting to see chefs and bakers making new twists on traditional American recipes…we use a lot of old cookbooks when making our pies, and update the
recipes just slightly…it leads to some great recipes we can sort of call our own, with homage to the humble bakers of, really, not so long ago.

Other than your own, what are your favorite dessert spots in New York City?
Anybody that makes fresh ice cream!  We recently met the Van Leeuwen folks and tried their ice cream – delicious.

Who thought of the ingenious egg sandwich with the egg baked into the bread?
That was a collaborative effort all the way, but it took a few rounds of perfecting and testing before we got it.  We’ve got more
ideas to spin on it, like adding cured meats and other types of cheese and herbs.

Any plans for additional locations, perhaps a Manhattan outpost?
Not yet, but if we do expand it will probably be in Brooklyn, and in Gowanus preferably.

Photo Credit: Toby Bannister

Four and Twenty Blackbirds
Address: 439 Third Ave., nr. 8th Street
Phone: (212)741-6699