Deanna from Whitefish, Montana, has a dispute with her husband over the definition of potpie. She says it’s a type of soup with dumplings; he says it can’t be called a pie if it doesn’t have a crust. There is such a thing as a pot pie without a crust! The Pennsylvania Dutch version with chicken and noodles is also known as Bot Boi. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Potpie Without a Crust? Is It Even a Pie?”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Dina, and I’m calling from Whitefish, Montana.
Whitefish, Montana. Well, welcome to the show, Dina. What can we do for you?
Well, my question is about a food. I grew up in central Pennsylvania, and we had a food called pot pie. And I was telling my husband about pot pie, and he had a big problem with it because it’s actually a soup. It’s not a pie. It’s more like a chicken noodle soup with homemade flat dumplings.
So I told my husband, so we have this food called pot pie, but it’s not a pie. And he said, no, it can’t be called a pie if it’s not a pie. There’s no crust. There’s no pie pan. There’s no baking. It’s a soup. He’s from the Midwest, so a pie is a pie. We got to wondering how a soup could be called pot pie.
I had some people say, well, maybe it’s because you have the ingredients and you make it in a pot. And that didn’t seem right to me. But I did ask my mom, who used to work as a cook in a nursing home with a bunch of Pennsylvania Dutch ladies. And she said, oh, it’s not pot pie. It’s bot boy. And that’s what the Pennsylvania Dutch ladies call it. And somehow it became pot pie. That seemed to make more sense to me, but we still have really no idea.
Pot pie? I mean, it’s crazy. That is correct. It’s disappointing, too. Yes, Martha and I are both nodding. As a matter of fact, there is a really nice entry for this in the Dictionary of American Regional English, one of our most trusted reference works that has an entry for chicken pot pie that you’d think would be the pot pie that we all know and love, but really it’s kind of like chicken dumplings.
When you read the description, yeah. And it does specifically say that it’s a Pennsylvania Dutch dish, sometimes also called slippery pot pie. It looks kind of like a chicken dumpling stew and doesn’t have a pie crust.
Yeah, and I had to, I thought I was crazy in imagining things, so I had to look it up and show my husband the recipe. See, it’s not a pie. It’s actually a soup. But we still, you know, but he was like, I’m from the Midwest. You can’t call it a pie. You can’t call it a pie.
Well, what I would like to encourage your husband to do is just say, you know what? Sometimes words have more than one meaning. I think the other point that Grant and I would circle around to is the fact that, boy, anytime we talk about food on this show, there are so many different opinions. We were just talking about Long John’s, those donuts, and we’ve gotten so much email about what you call those bar donuts. But just accept that words have more than one meaning. When it comes to food, words often have, you cannot rely on even just across the county line that the word is going to have the same meaning at all.
So it’s essentially just people in central Pennsylvania calling it what they want. Yeah, mainly central Pennsylvania and the North Midlands.
Okay. Well, Dina, thank you so much for calling. Appreciate it.
Yes, thank you for taking my call. Take care.
Sure, and I say tell your husband if he can’t stand the heat, don’t eat the meal. Stay away from the pie.
That’s right. Bye-bye. Take care. Thank you. Bye-bye. Take care.
Well, if you have a dispute in your household over a word or phrase, we’d love to hear about it. 877-929-9673 or send us the whole story in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.
