History and Origin
Moon Pies were first introduced in the Chattanooga Tennessee area around the time of the beginning of the Great Depression. Bakers there combined recently-introduced Marshmallow creme fluff with graham crackers to devise an early sandwich-like prototype to the Moon Pie. Eventually, chocolate was added to create roughly the final shape known today. The origin of the name is suspected to relate to the pie’s round appearance and may have been acquired back before chocolate was added, giving a color more similar to that of the moon.
Precisely how and when people began the custom of eating Moon Pies with RC Cola is unknown, although it is likely that their inexpensive prices, combined with their larger serving sizes, contributed to establishing this combination as the "working man's lunch". The popularity of this combination was celebrated in a popular song of the 1950s, by Big Bill Lister, "Gimmee an RC Cola and a Moon Pie.".
Since New Year's Eve 2008, the city of Mobile, Alabama raises a 12-foot-tall (3.7 m) lighted mechanical moon pie to celebrate the coming of the new year. The giant banana colored MoonPie is raised by a crane to a height of 200 feet (61 m) as the clock strikes midnight. Also, the city had for the 2008 New Year's celebration the world's largest moon pie baked for the occasion. It weighed 55 pounds (25 kg) and contained 45,000 calories.
An annual RC & Moon Pie Festival is celebrated in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and a Moon Pie Eating Contest is held in Bessemer, Alabama.
On October 16, 2010, Sonya Thomas, a competitive eater known as the "Black Widow," ate 38 MoonPies in eight minutes in Caruthersville, Missouri.
Newport, Tennessee held its first annual Moon Pie Festival in May, 2012.
Read more about this topic: Moon Pie
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or origin:
“Don’t give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can’t express them. Don’t analyse yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)
“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)