Making Whoopies: The Official Whoopie Pie Book by Nancy Thompson (Down East, 2010)

Review by Joseph Thompson: Not much riles Mainers more than challenging them on the origin their food pyramid cornerstone: the whoopie pie. One who mentions Pennsylvania’s claim to that chocolate and cream confection risks being run out of town on a lobster boat.

It’s been done before for a whole lot less. With the fight brewing between Maine and Pennsylvania as to who gets to name the whoopie pie as their official state dessert or treat, it’s easy to imagine it’ll happen again soon. All this political williwaw makes Nancy Griffin’s Making Whoopies: The Official Whoopie Pie Book a sweet and timely resource.

As if prescient to the legislative windstorm that blew up only a few months after her book’s publication, Griffin plays fair. A surprising amount of research fills this book’s whoopie pie shaped covers. This includes not only origination claims from the Keystone State and Vacation Land, but also those espoused by fringe cultists who believe whoopie pies are a Bay State invention.

Yeah, right. As if anybody can believe that. It’s like saying Massachusetts would have elected a conservative to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.

For those who haven’t tried a whoopie pie before, imagine a pair of earmuffs. The ear covering parts are two moist chocolate cakes with a half-inch layer of creamy filling — either cream cheese or fluff based — holding them together. It’s no surprise that wherever they were invented, they come from a place known for long, cold winters. A body needs all the fuel it can get in February.

At first glance, Making Whoopies could be mistakenly dismissed as another regional, novelty cookbook. But Griffin sandwiches the rich filling of sixteen distinctly different recipes between entertaining cakes of history, lore and anecdotes gathered from home kitchens and bakeries across the northeast. Realizing most of the world may not be familiar with this strange dessert, she carefully bust myths, like the whoopie pie being an altered moon-pie, in cute “Whoopie Wisdom” sidebars.

And the recipes themselves? They’re to diet for. An unscientific test of the reprinted “‘Confidential Chat’ Boston Whoopie Pies” by a Maine reviewer got the lobster boat motors running when he mentioned the name of the recipe. Taste testers swore there was no way a whoopie pie that good could have come from anywhere but Down East.