Pie Rambling

Pie Rambling by Marianne Clay

Published in Central PA Magazine in 2017

Marianne Clay

What is it about pie? Sensual and maternal, sweet and savory, homemade pie hits all the right buttons. Growing up, I didn’t want cake for my birthday; I wanted my mother’s apple pie. She’d oblige, but after my summer birthday. Come fall and the arrival of just picked apples, she’d sit on the black kitchen stool with a green ceramic bowl nestling on her lap. Then, wielding a chilled silver fork, she’d combine Fluffo shortening with flour, salt, and a little ice water. The wonderful ritual of baking a sumptuous apple pie had begun.

Today, I still prefer pie to cake, and, when I seek a luscious, low-cost adventure, I go on a pie ramble. That’s a hunt for good pie while enjoying side trips through rolling farmland, little towns, urbanscapes, and, of course, the unexpected. To foster that happy feeling of spontaneity, I don’t plan much.

I begin this pie ramble where I live, in Lancaster. I choose a Tuesday, because Tuesday’s a market day, and I start early because Lancaster’s Central Market opens at 6 a.m. What a great time to come to this 19^th-century market house. Street parking is free for another hour, and the still empty aisles offer a great sweeping look at all the offerings. With the swirls of activity to unload and set up, the smells of tangy cheese and sweet baked goods, and the rioting color of flowers and produce, I forget the cold darkness.

After buying celery, broccoli and acorn squash to mitigate all the pie, I stop at Wendy Jo’s Homemade, for either a sour cherry or a Key Lime pie. My January taste buds, after the treats of Christmas, seek the tangy tug of sweet and sour. Wendy Jo Hess has been operating Wendy Jo’s, a business that includes her booth at Market and the bakery where she and her staff of two make everything, for the last 12 years. They use, as much as they can, local ingredients, such as milk from Lancaster’s Pine View Acres Dairy and apples from Kauffman’s Fruit Farm in Bird-in-Hand.
  

As a child, Wendy grew up south of Lancaster City on a dairy farm, where she always found interesting things to do from feeding calves, baling hay, to baking. “Grandma Mabel Hess taught me how to make a pie crust,” she says. After college and a bit of traveling, Wendy returned home. She thought she didn’t know what she wanted to do. But she knew. In no time, she rented a bakery and was running her stand.

“I love Market, and I love the idea that I sell my goods at the same Market where both my grandmothers and my mother worked years ago. No one should visit Lancaster and not go to Market.” Speaking of visitors, they often seek the regional food favorites, particularly shoofly pie and whoopie pies, to bring home. No problem, they can find both at half a dozen stands at Market. But as for me, I am carrying both a sour cherry pie and a Key Lime pie and am ready to ramble. Next stop, York County.

Because I’m rambling, I shun Route 30 for the old Lincoln Highway and drive west through the river town of Columbia. Some great antique shops have sprung up, and the Watch Museum, though little known outside the tick-tock world of horology, fascinates with its amazing timepieces. Of course, I’m thinking more about pie than time, but if Flour Child bakery in Columbia was open on Tuesdays, I’d stop there. Owner Alixe Ingoglia specializes in cakes and cookies, but she bakes a fine pie, too.

For years, my life has straddled York and Lancaster Counties, since I live in one and help run a family business in the other.  I have crossed the Susquehanna River thousands of times, but I always look forward to the wide view of water and rock, hill and sky. In 20 minutes, as the sun rises, I’m at York’s Central Market also open on Tuesdays. I love this Market. When my children were babes, I lived up the street and came often, stroller in one hand and bag in the other. Enormous roof trusses span this market house, and I always look up to see their soar.

So many of the bakery stands, from All About Brownies to the Red Brick Bakery from Red Lion, weren’t here when I lived so close, but Myers Salads & Pastries, a 90-year-old York County family business, is a Central Market tradition. Over the years, I’ve bought pumpkin pies, apple dumplings and tubs of broccoli salad at the Myers stand. Without hesitation, 28-year-old Jolanda Myers, who is fourth-generation, tells me pumpkin pie is their top seller.  I know they’re good, and I get one.

Since York’s Eastern Market, another great pie source, is only open on Fridays, I drive to another favorite pie place, Whitecomb’s Farm Store. Located just a few miles north of York City on Roosevelt Avenue, Whitecomb’s usually bustles. This morning, it’s deserted. Everyone else knows Whitecomb’s closes in January and reopens in mid-March. On a previous visit, bakery manager Anna Krout had told me about producing a lemon sponge pie without a cracked top. Lemon sponge pie requires a longer bake time, as much as an hour, she had explained, and a moderate oven. “We try very hard,” she had said, “not to get a crack.” Today, even if it had a cavern down the middle, I’d buy a lemon sponge, and a pint of York County’s own Beck’s ice cream.

I leave the empty parking lot and continue north on Roosevelt Avenue. I squint to see where Roosevelt Avenue transforms into Bull Road, but it’s invisible. No matter, I arrive at Hake’s Grocery at the intersection of Canal and Bull Roads. What a place! While 50-year-old Hake’s doesn’t shine like a mega-supermarket, it offers personality and great prices. Plus, you really can find everything you might need from hormone-free meat from Weaver’s Butchers of Wellsville, The New York Times on Sundays, and live bait. On Saturdays, people wait in line at Hake’s to buy roasts, steaks, and chops. In fact, people drive from Baltimore for the scenic road trip and the meats at Hake’s. On this Tuesday, things are quieter, so I quickly receive a deli sandwich made with garlicy roast beef, and I fill my gas tank. (Hake’s sells ethanol-free.)

Fortified in every way, I continue north. Must be the protein in the sandwich, because I remind myself I’ve never seen the commemorative marker celebrating the effort to pull Pennsylvania farmers out of the mud. Pies and farming are so connected. So, while thinking about the freeze and thaw of January in York County and about how deep the mud probably got on these windy, country roads before paving, I head for the marker. At the intersection of Rossville and Bull Road just south of Lewisberry and at the doorstep of Pinchot Park, I read the words posted by the Historical and Museum Commission: “To ‘get the farmer out of the mud’ was the road from here to Rossville. Gov. Gifford Pinchot broke ground here, July 23, 1931, to inaugurate the rural road improvement program of the Pennsylvania Department of Highways under the Act of June 22, 1931.”

Marker mission accomplished, I head south before turning right onto Old York Road (SR 4026) towards Dillsburg. I’ve heard about great scones, cakes, and pies from Sweet Things Confections and Pastries on North Baltimore Street in Dillsburg. Plus, the bakery shares its Victorian house with Spring House Artisans and Antique shop, so how can I go wrong? I can. Sweet Things is always closed Sundays through Tuesdays, and so is the antique shop. So onward to see Dillsburg’s 18^th-century plantation.

 

Turns out Dillsburg takes its name, not from the Dill pickle as its New Year’s Eve pickle drop suggests, but from the Dill family who raised food for the frontier and flax for weaving linen. On their plantation, the Dills also ran a mill, a whiskey distillery, and a tavern, keeping family, indentured servants, hired hands, and slaves very busy on its 500 acres. Thanks to the passion of those who banded together as the Northern York County Historical and Preservation Society (NYCHPS), a piece of that 18^th-century plantation plus its 1794 tavern and a barn have been rescued and made ready for visitors.

 

Dill’s Tavern, a large stone building on Baltimore Street, now appears as it did in its heyday, but today it fills with events and activities instead of thirsty travelers.  Outside the tavern, I learn about the well where on a sweltering July 1, 1863, General J.E.B. Stuart and his 6000 men watered themselves and their horses. In addition to water, the Confederates grabbed whatever food, horses, and supplies they could. Their stop was brief, as the soldiers were leaving to rejoin General Lee at a battle raging nearby in Gettysburg.

 

Of course, today Gettysburg is a 30-minute car ride away from Dillsburg; the drive to downtown Harrisburg takes about the same time. I opt for downtown Harrisburg to meet Lela Mae Henderson, and try her pie. Lela Mae sells only pie, and only one kind – sweet potato. If you want one, you call her, ideally, a day before, but even the morning of, can work. Thankfully, I called, and a sweet potato pie, my first, is cooling in her kitchen.  

 

Lela Mae, an exile from New Orleans while Hurricane Katrina was devastating her home there, spent the days of the storm’s fury at a co-worker’s family home in Alexandria, Louisiana. While waiting for the situation to improve, Lela Mae got a call from Rev. Martin D. Odom of Bethel A.M.E. Church in Harrisburg. Her good friend urged her not to return to New Orleans but to come directly to Harrisburg and settle permanently. “I did,” she says. “I embraced Harrisburg, and Harrisburg has embraced me.”

 

She found a job, a home, became active in Rev. Odom’s church, and began baking sweet potato pies for church suppers. “Transplanted Southerners loved my pies, and people who had never eaten them before loved them,” Lela Mae says. “Sweet potato pies being new to so many people up here startled me, just as much as the snow. I grew up with sweet potato pies. My aunts and my grandmothers would pull sweet potatoes out of the ground and put them in the fireplace or in the oven to bake.”

 

Not only was she surprised so many people had never eaten sweet potato pie, she was also surprised no one seemed to differentiate between a yam and a sweet potato. “A yam is yellow and the flavor isn’t as rich. Sweet potatoes are orange and have a richer, distinct taste. In New Orleans, everyone eats sweet potatoes. Yams, well, in New Orleans, yams are something in a can.”

Five years ago, with the demand for her sweet potato pie growing beyond her church, Lela Mae saw the opportunity for a sweet potato pie business. After fulfilling the requirements, she began baking and selling pies for pick-up from her home. Since then, she puts each pie in a white cardboard box affixed with a scripture she lives by. “Proverbs 14:23,” and she quotes, “’All hard work brings a profit.’”

The wonderful baking smell in her kitchen practically intoxicates me, and her pie tastes like a sweet and perfect harmony. What a moment to savor before I move on. Dillsburg whet my appetite for a trip to the National Civil War Museum, and I want to see the Susquehanna Art Museum.

No wonder pie rambles are such fun.