In our new column “Pregame Platter,” senior contributing writer Mike Unger selects the best food and drink options coinciding with that week’s opponent.

Bengals at Ravens, Sunday Sept. 7, 1 p.m., M&T Bank Stadium, CBS

After a month of seemingly interminable preseason games (preseason football is like going on a date with a person you know you’ll never get lucky with—you can bring your A-game, but in the end, what’s the point?) the Ravens get to do it for real Sunday against the NFL’s most hideously outfitted franchise.

What to Eat: Cincinnati is known, of course, for its cinnamon-based chili. I got this recipe from my friend Pinkerton, a longtime Fells Pointer originally from the Cincinnati area. It’s the real deal.

Ingredients: 

• 1 quart water 
• 2 pounds ground beef 
• 2 medium onions finely chopped
• 2 (8-ounce) cans tomato sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 3-4 tablespoons chili powder
• 1 tsp unsweetened coco powder
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves, 
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 whole bay leaf
• 4 garlic cloves crushed (or 1 tbsp chopped garlic from jar)
• 2 tbsp vinegar 
• 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

Directions: Add ground beef to water in large pot. Stir until beef separated into a fine texture. Boil slowly for 30 minutes. Add other ingredients and stir to blend. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for about three hours until desired consistency is reached.

If making anything beyond toast exceeds your mental and physical capabilities on a Sunday (believe me, I understand), pick up a steak chili pie from Dangerously Delicious in Canton. It’s filled with steak, onions, tomatoes, kidney beans and “all the right spices,” and it’s well, dangerously delicious. Call 410-522-PIES to order one 24 hours in advance.

What to Drink: The Queen City has a number of microbrews that I’ll discuss when the Ravens travel to Cincy at the end of October, but unfortunately, none of them are available here. (My rule of thumb on tracking down beer is to call Total Wine in Laurel or The Wine Source in Hampden. If they don’t carry it, I quit looking.) Porters and stouts pair well with chili, so I’ll be going with our own Heavy Seas Peg Leg Imperial Stout, which, at eight percent, packs a punch.

Aunt Erma’s

Pennsylvania Dutch Market, 11121 York Rd., Cockeysville, 410-316-1534.

The
pies, cakes, and cookies at this busy spot in a corner of the market
look and taste like they’re fresh from a home kitchen. There are whoopie
pies filled with peanut butter, mint, or chocolate-chip cream; classic
apple, shoofly, and chocolate-chiffon pies; rice-cereal treats;
pistachio cupcakes; and pumpkin cake rolls with cream-cheese frosting.

Editor’s pick: The chocolate-peanut-butter cookie with a peanut-butter cup embedded in the center.

Atwaters

Several locations including 429 E. Belvedere Ave., 410-323-2396.

The
bakery/cafe may be more known for its inventive soups and rustic breads
that are also crafted into assorted sandwiches, but plenty of sweet
stuff also comes out of its kitchens.

Editor’s pick:
The Pimlico cake—a Baltimore classic with yellow chiffon cake with
Bavarian cream between the layers and a chocolate-ganache frosting
dotted with walnuts.

Dangerously Delicious Pies

Several locations including 2839 O’Donnell St., 410-522-7437.

Owner
Rodney Henry has made a lucrative career out of rolling dough. His
concoctions—from the sweet chocolate-ganache chess pie to the savory
steak pie—have drawn attention for their tender, flaky crusts and fresh
ingredients.

Editor’s pick: The Elvis pie—peanut buttercream with Swiss chocolate topped with bacon.

Patisserie Poupon

Two locations including 820 E. Baltimore St., 410-332-0390.

Owner/baker
Joseph Poupon’s confections are known not only for their taste, but
also for their artistic presentations. For example, the Fraisier has a
marzipan finish decorated with a white-chocolate-dipped strawberry and
is cut to expose sliced strawberries within.

Editor’s pick: The Royale—a dense chocolate-mousse cake topped with chocolate petals cupping whole hazelnuts in the center.

Piedigrotta Bakery

1300 Bank St., 410-522-6900.

The
counters are piled high with all sorts of treats—cheesecake, pannetone,
and lush fruit pies. But proprietor/baker Carminantonio Iannaccone also
turns out one of the most delicious tiramisus in town, which makes
sense. He claims to have invented the treat laden with ladyfingers,
mascarpone, and Marsala wine in his native Italy.

Editor’s pick: Tiramisu, of course.

Makin’ Whoopie! Fun Fact

According
to food historians, Amish women baked whoopie pies and packed them in
farmers’ lunches. When the farmers would find the treats in their lunch
pails, they would shout “Whoopie!”

Local Legacy

Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Maine have all laid claim to the prestigious title of ‘Birthplace of the Whoopie Pie’

Baltimore’s Pie Guy/Music Man sits at an outdoor table in Fells Point on a balmy fall night, waiting for a gig to start at Bertha’s.

As he sips his favorite indulgence—Jack Daniels and water—he shoots the breeze about everything from his recent appearance on Food Network Star to an upcoming month-long band tour that will take him from his hometown to Ohio and Texas and places in between. Wearing his trademark porkpie hat, he doesn’t go unnoticed as passersby nudge each other and whisper, “That’s Rodney Henry.”

Henry, 48, greets them all, shaking hands and giving brotherly bear hugs. He’s thrilled that one guy is wearing a Dangerously Delicious Pies T-shirt, a testament to the baked goods he started rolling out for sale 10 years ago. Recognition in his hometown is about as sweet as the popular Baltimore Bomb pies, made with Berger Cookies, that are sold at his Canton shop.

But he doesn’t just get attention here. After his summer run on the TV show—where he proclaimed that “pie style” is a way of life—he’s approached by fans at airports and other public places around the country.

“More people recognize me,” he acknowledges with his signature sly grin and mischievous blue eyes. “We talk smack. I love it. It’s fun.”

Lazlo Lee, the head baker at the Dangerously Delicious Pies in Canton, likens Henry’s burgeoning popularity to that of blues musician John Lee Hooker, who didn’t become well-known until he was in his 50s. “He’s slowly being recognized,” he says. “I call him the Colonel Sanders of pie. He’s become [an icon] except he wears a leather jacket and that freakin’ fedora.”

Henry is a presence with his noticeable tattoos—the pie wings are a favorite—and the distinctive brimmed hats covering his slick, shaved head.

“He’s a charmer. He’s larger than life,” says local rockabilly musician Sean K. Preston, who was on hand for Henry’s Fells Point show. “He’s a helluva guy.”

Henry has come a long way from his days on the campus of Towson University, where he majored in “fun” when not attending his mass-communications classes. He ended his college career short of graduating. “I went to school to chase girls,” he says sheepishly. “I was a party guy, man.”

Not that his footloose lifestyle has changed. After his 11 p.m. show at Bertha’s, he takes an entourage of friends—including his opening acts Alison Lewis and Don “Doop” Duprie, both from Detroit—back to the Guilford five-bedroom home he calls the “pie palace” and the “house that pie built,” where they jam until 7 in the morning.

One of Henry’s most well-known songs is “Paperboy,” an homage to his days as a Washington Post delivery kid in Silver Spring, where he grew up in a middle-class suburban household with busy parents—his dad was a computer-company salesman; his mom, a political activist—two sisters, and a brother. He’s the only musician in the family. “My parents are super supportive,” he says. “My dad is so proud, though he asks me, ‘Why can’t you be like Sinatra?’”

He chuckles about his father’s comment. Being a ’40s Rat Pack crooner was never an aspiration for Henry, who often sports colorful Western-style shirts, cowboy boots, and jeans while belting out the blues and strumming his Gibson guitar on stage.

He’s been a professional musician since he was 24 but started with the trumpet in elementary school. Not that he was particularly gifted in the beginning.

“When I was 13, I did Beach Boy covers in junior high,” he says. “I was horrible.” He really learned to play the guitar when he was a Marine Corps grunt after high school, he says, jamming every night with the other recruits while stationed at a Naval weapons base in Northern California.

His current band is the Glenmont Popes, named after his childhood neighborhood in Montgomery County and one of his favorite movies, The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) with Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts.

“Popes are the people you go to,” explains Henry, the band’s front man. “It’s a slick thing.”

It’s hard to say what came first: the musician or the baker. He learned to bake cakes and bread as a teen from his grandmother and great-aunt, while visiting the family farm in Minnesota. But Henry also remembers being enamored early on with a 25-cent slice of apple pie at a local diner.

“I’ve always been a pie guy since I was a little kid,” he sums up. He also found he could impress the girls with his homemade pies, recalling a Christmas past when he made a flaky offering (lard was his secret ingredient then) for a former young love, culling a recipe from a book called Pies and Tarts.

More importantly, Henry began to realize the bonding aspect of the baked dish. “Pie lets people talk to each other,” he says. “It encourages conversation.”

But music also beckoned, leading him to tour the U.S. with an eight-to-10-member “low-echelon” band. “I wanted to be a musician,” he says. “If you’re a musician, you’re a musician.” Life on the road didn’t always pay the bills, though, especially with a wife and young children. Henry found that selling pies gave him the extra income he needed. “I make pies, so I can pay for my rock-and-roll habit,” he says.

Henry is now twice divorced, and his two children—Waylon, 10, and Lily-Anne, 8—live in Melbourne Beach, FL, where he is a frequent visitor. “My body and mind need the down time with the kids,” he wrote recently on Facebook. On holidays, the children often travel with him. They have learned to accept their peripatetic dad: “The road is my home,” he says. “I have a traveling bone.”

Henry came to Charm City to live when he was 25. “I’ve always had a fascination with Baltimore,” he says. “I represent Baltimore.”