When Mims Bledsoe was working on her graduate degree in philosophy at the University of Georgia, she drove several times a week from her home in Atlanta to Athens, eighty miles away. On the way there, she pondered Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. On the way back, she fantasized about opening a pie shop. The pie shop prevailed in 2011 in a Buckhead shopping strip. For her first menu, Bledsoe developed a watermelon chiffon pie, which she viewed as a kind of reclamation project. As she’d learned from her cookbook collection, chiffon pies enjoyed a surge of popularity in the 1950s and ’60s. “But the more popular they became, the worse the recipes got,” she says, “eventually culminating into assemblages of sugar-free fluff.” Her version rescues the old favorite with pure whipped cream, unflavored gelatin, and fresh summer fruit at its peak.