Pi Day is celebrated on March 14 because the date represents the first three digits of π: 3.14. A fun day for math enthusiasts, it is often marked by eating pie (hooray for homophones) and celebrating the importance of π in mathematics.
Pi Day also coincides with the anniversary of my late father’s passing, with this year marking 25 years. At the time, I was barely thirteen, a newly minted teenager. What came after was a rough adolescence (read: middle schoolers are the absolute worst) and an equally trying time for my mother. While the grief was often overwhelming, it paled beside the cultural stigma surrounding mental health — God forbid any of it bring shame or show sign of personal weakness. Instead, there were other prime directives afoot: observe stoicism and bury yourself in (school)work.
I missed Baba terribly. His voice. His laugh. His embrace. The smell of his cologne. The mountains of mixtapes he made. His excellent taste in food. Back then, most days I felt surrounded by eggshells. Folks whispering and tiptoeing, hesitating to say any words, especially anything about my dad. Pretty ironic given that was all I wanted to do: to recount his best stories and remember his life.
me with Baba & Mom, circa 1990
Baba always encouraged to be my best every single day, humility being paramount in doing so. He was stubborn and fastidious (at times, ridiculously so), qualities I continue to see in myself, even past those impressionable teenage years. Although he’s no longer with us, I often feel his presence with every decisive choice made — another personality trait we shared.
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THE CONCEPT
Baba was also a man who appreciated good food, treating my mom and me to notable dining experiences a few times a year before he fell ill. He was the one who first introduced me to the art of eating (that is, outside our family kitchens), which included fancy seafood dinners in the Jersey Highlands (Doris and Ed’s comes to mind), white clothed tables in New York City (my first being at the original Union Square Café), hunts for the consummate bowl of wonton noodle soup in Chinatown, and the sushi counter at Tomoe (where the line would always be out the door). I have him to thank for bringing me into the world of cuisine — my eventual love of wine could scarcely exist without his influence.
What a challenge it had been to settle on a way to honor his memory over the years, mostly because I didn’t want it to feel clichéd or contrived. Even with the deepest loss, I still desired to be thoughtful and original. It was on this day in 2012 when I finally arrived at the most poetic way to do so. With the anniversary of his death falling on Pi Day, baking a pie was precisely the kind of ritual I could observe for years to come. I could explore different recipes and variations; or I could channel Ina Garten and go store bought.
To truly commit to the homophonic spirit of this nerdy holiday, you can bet I took it a step further. Phillip is my dad’s American name, so with our last name being Kan (pronounced kahn), I used to jokingly call him P-Kan Nut. Take this clever play on pecan, his favorite snacks comprising nuts of all kinds (e.g., salted cashews, boiled peanuts, toasted almonds, butter pecan flavors), and his go-to dessert of ice cream — a pecan pie a la mode for P. Kan was too perfect not to stick.
Over the years, I’ve baked all sorts of recipes for pecan pie and discovered some awesome bakeries with delicious takes on it (though, Petee’s Pie remains my favorite). I’d like to think my technique has improved a bit from the first pie I’d ever attempted from scratch (please see Exhibit A from 2012 🙈). However, the coolest pecan pie I’ve made to date, hands down, was the pecan sandie pie recipe by Genevieve Ko. Its diamond-triangle pattern, specifically with alternating pieces dusted in confectioner’s sugar, makes the pie a real sight to behold — a beautiful masterpiece.
Pi Day 2012 ~ 2017
my pecan pies from 2012 through 2017 (left to right, from top to bottom)
2012:
🗃️ rye pecan pie adapted by Julia Moskin from NYT Cooking
2013:
🗃️ pecan & chocolate tart with Bourbon whipped crème fraîche by Suzanne Goin from Bon Appétit
🗃️ German chocolate pecan pie from The New Pie cookbook
2020:
🗃️ German chocolate pecan pie from The New Pie cookbook
❧
Pi Day 2021 ~ 2024
pecan pies (and their respective wine pairings) from 2021 through 2024
2021:
🗃️ brown butter honey pecan pie from Pie for Everyone cookbook 🍷 Royal Tokaji 2016 Tokaji Aszú ‘Red Label’ 5 Puttonyos
2022:
🥧 junior brown butter honey pecan pie (Pi Day edition) from Petee’s Pie (LES) 🍷 Jean Foillard 2016 Morgon ‘Cuvée 3.14’
2023:
🗃️ pecan sandie pie by Genevieve Ko from NYT Cooking 🍷 Bodegas Hidalgo-La Gitana NV Cream [Sherry] ‘Alameda’
2024:
🗃️ pecan slab pie by Claire Saffitz from NYT Cooking 🍷 Valdespino NV Amontillado ‘Contrabandista’
my cat Faraday enjoying some pie bits, c. 2017
❧
THE MENU
Pi Day 2025
2025’s Pi Day pecan pie with candied ginger & rum
2025:
🗃️ pecan pie with candied ginger & rum by Alice Medrich from Food & Wine
🍷 Philip Lardot 2022 Pinot Noir [Landwein der Mosel]
📝 I’m a sucker for a cool wine label. So, imagine my delight when seeing Source Material drop an offer for a German Pinot Noir sporting this simple tic-tac-toe drawing, with π in place of X. Since I’ve paired pecan pie with Gamay before, Spätburgunder would be a close analog of that, especially with it having similar fruity, juicy, and spicy profile. Not sure why π appears on the label at all — perhaps a kinship to Morgon’s Côte du Py in Beaujolais or just the first two letters in Pinot? Who’s to say. But Philip (Lardot) for Phillip (Kan)? Couldn’t tie a more fitting bow if I’d tried!
🪄 More so a symbolic pairing with its label, this Pinot Noir by Philip Lardot had an understated panache behind an approachability for wine novices and nerds alike — unmistakably Mosel in its minerality and mouthwatering acidity, proudly conveying the growing potential of Pinot Noir in this region.
🍷 Lenkey Pinceszet 2000 Tokaji Aszú 6 Puttonyos
📝 Not sure when I became a numerology authority with wine (read: accidentally). However so, when the numbers call to me, I just let them do their thing. Case in point: when I stumbled upon this dessert wine from 2000 by one of my favorite Hungarian producers, it was certainly fate. As this Pi Day marks the 25th anniversary of my father’s passing, a 2000 vintage seemed apropos in commemorating today’s pie tribute. Additionally, this particular Aszú was only the second vintage that founder Géza Lenkey Sr. produced at the family estate before tragically passing away before the wine was bottled.
🪄 The candied ginger featured in this pecan pie recipe plays into the ginger flavor typically found in Furmint. Despite its 25-year-old age, this Tokaji Aszú still had vivacious acidity shining through, with notes of apricot skins, sweet ginger, honeyed citrus, caramelized pineapple, and a Sherry-like nuttiness. This made for a formidable alternative to Sauternes, equally ageworthy and complex.
THE WINEUP
Pi Day 2025 wineup
Philip Lardot 2022 Pinot Noir [Landwein der Mosel]
$42 @ Crush Wine Co. via Source Material Vom Boden (New York) | 🇩🇪 still red Pinot Noir (Spätburgunder) bitter cherries ・ herbal minerality ・ relaxed rusticity
Lenkey Pincészet 2000 Tokaji Aszú 6 Puttonyos
$95 @ Dandelion Wine Palinkerie (New York) | 🇭🇺 dessert white Furmint apricot skins ・ sweet ginger ・ honeyed citrus
THE CODA
I feel fortunate I’m able to freely share this quintessential part of my story with RogueVines — I’ve given some of my Pi Day goodies with them since 2021, as they’ve become such a big part of my life over the last six years. Pretty much family.
We made this week’s wine club meetup themed for Pi Day, featuring wines from non-France Europe to get out of our comfort zone (and to align with what I had already earmarked for pairing). Our elder millennial selves called back to what the late 90s felt and sounded like, especially when my friend Dina shared a 1999 Riesling from Hermann Ludes, a happy accident alongside my 2000 Tokaji Aszú from Lenkey. It inspired a listening session featuring the City of Angels soundtrack, an album I had listened to on repeat during those long drives to visit my dad at NYU Medical Center’s cancer wing.
Despite the depressing tracks for a just-as-heartbreaking film premise (I’m looking at you, Peter Gabriel), I find just as much beauty as I do pain in playing through the album many years later. I’m instantly back to my sullen teenager ways, a combination of anger, disappointment, and annoyance that we were once again “stuck” at the hospital when what I really yearned for was adolescent normalcy. I hated these circumstances that had forced me to grow up more quickly than my peers and face an unfathomable hardship — at the time something to which many of my classmates couldn’t relate. But mostly, it was incredibly awful watching my father descend further into an illness that pulled no punches.
However, similar to reclaiming my fear of needles by getting at tattoo, this Pi Day milestone has allowed me to retrace the messy scars of grief that have been deeply etched in my psyche. Listening to the music from back then is no longer as hard as it once was — finding his mixtapes was undoubtedly key in accomplishing this. Instead of feeling depressed and full of sorrow, I now choose to view it as another way to feel closer to Baba.
Come every Pi Day (this one no different), at the mercy of muscle memory, I embody Jenna Hunterson from Waitress, baking all the feelings into pie. From the eponymous musical based on the film, these lyrics by Sara Bareilles say it all:
My hands pluck the things I know that I'll need, I take the sugar and butter from the pantry… I add the flour to begin what I am hoping to start, And then it's down with the recipe, And bake from the heart…
[…]
What's inside? Everyone wants to know what's inside, And I always tell them, But I feel more than words can say; You wanna know what's inside? Simple question, so then what's the answer? My whole life is in here, In this kitchen baking; What a mess I'm making…
I used to stress out quite a bit in preparation for Pi Day, agonizing about the recipe at hand, its mise en place, and the amount of time I should have set aside for “smooth” execution. The thought of making pie crust from scratch would quickly send me into a tailspin. Even when the pie made it in the oven, I’d still harbor anxiety about how it would turn out, uncanny given my dad’s perfectionist tendencies.
Pi Day 2025
Yet here I am, thirteen years later, rolling out another but (hopefully) less crumbly crust dough into my trusted Pyrex pie plate. Wild to think the amount of time elapsed since that first pie tribute as being equal to the number of years in this lifetime that Baba and I had together. But what’s that thing Tennyson once said? ’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Maybe clichés aren’t so bad after all.
