A daughter searches for her mother's pie crust recipe, and finds a real slice of life about family, a lost measuring cup and a beekeeper named Stubby.
By AMY WIMMER
Published May 11, 2003
[Times photo: Lara Cerri]
Roberta
Wimmer's cookbook with the rolling pin she gave her daughter, Amy, and the
old pastry cutter that belonged to Roberta's mother-in-law. Click for photo gallery
MOUNT ETNA, Ind. - Once, on the stainless-steel countertop of her bakery, my mother tried to teach me how to bake a pie.
I thought she worked too fast and explained too little. I was aggravated that she didn't measure her ingredients. She baked more from memory than recipes.
She didn't hold my attention long.
Like a lot of girls who long to be something their mothers are not, I never had much patience for things she did better than I, like singing harmony, growing a garden and shopping with coupons.
Which explains why, despite my genes and my upbringing, I can't bake a pie.
Two years ago, a few months after our ill-fated baking lesson, my mother died unexpectedly at age 66. In the few hours she was in the hospital, she called everyone by my dad's name. Her sentences started off hopefully, with a couple of words that made sense, then faded into gibberish.
But many of her nonsense phrases ended with a one-syllable, clearly spoken word:
My dad and I would look at each other over her hospital bed and share a small laugh. "Everything is pie," he'd say.
Eighty-eight varieties
In the world of Roberta Wimmer, everything was pie. Strawberry-rhubarb pie. Peanut butter pie. Gooseberry pie. Boysenberry pie. Raisin pie. Caramel apple pie. Butterscotch pie. Peach crumb pie.
And, though she hated the smell of it and didn't understand why anyone would order one, mincemeat pie.
Her bakery offered 88 varieties, and she liked customers to challenge her to come up with more. Until her doctor told her she was making her arthritis worse, she mixed her crust by hand with an old-fashioned wood-handled pastry blender because she didn't trust the commercial Kitchen-Aid standing mixer she had spent a bundle on.
She started baking at the Hoosier-Land Restaurant, a truck stop off Interstate 69 that soon became famous for its fresh-baked pies. Years later, at 61, she went into business for herself, twisting my dad's arm until he turned one of the units in his mini-storage building into a full-service bakery.
She called it the Back Door Bakery because it was just steps from the back stoop of my parents' home.
She wanted to call it the Back Door Bake Shop, but a neighbor pointed out that patrons might confuse it with another business in Mount Etna, the bait shop.
Just outside the bakery sat my dad's collection of scrap metal and old cars, including his aging tractors and the 1976 International Scout he keeps meaning to fix up. Mount Etna has 110 people, two churches, a volunteer fire department and no stoplights. It isn't really on the way to anywhere.
Still, her pies became legendary. Two pies once brought $500 apiece at an auction to raise money for local 4-H clubs. My mother was a nonpartisan baker, filling orders for former Indiana Congressman Ed Roush, a Democrat, and a museum devoted to my home county's favorite son, Republican Dan Quayle, the former vice president.
Many of her customers were people I knew, like my former teachers at Lancaster Elementary or the parents of old high school friends. The mortician who handled my mother's funeral was a regular customer who stopped by regularly to pick up whatever fruit pie was fresh from the oven.
Other customers were people I never met; they heard about the bakery and traveled miles for the pies. Some of them lined up at her funeral to meet the children she talked about so much.
A few asked me for her pie crust recipe.
I told them she had never shared it with me.
The truth is, I never asked. Too late, I realized that I should have.
Pillsbury flour and canola oil
Some people think of pie crust as a necessary evil, the bland receptacle for the apple or cherry or pumpkin filling. They eat only the business end of a pie, leaving behind a fluted strip of drab, oatmeal-colored dough.
Even those people - sometimes especially those people - loved my mother's pie crust.
Her forearms were scarred from hot fruit pie filling that oozed from crusts when she slipped pies out of her convection oven. The crust was the common denominator in all those pies - a crust that can be described only in cliches.
It was light. It was flaky. It was slightly sweet.
I couldn't let it be lost forever. My mother was gone, but the thing she was best known for was still out there somewhere. I wanted that piece of her.
I tore through her bakery the summer after she died, believing I would recognize the recipe when I saw it. My mother didn't have anything you could call a filing system; she clipped newspaper recipes and tore pages from magazines, stashing them in drawers and wedging them into cookbooks.
The cookbooks bore the names of small Indiana church congregations or out-of-the-way eateries like the Durbin Country Inn in Rushville, Ind.
I recognized one - The Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book - as a gift she received shortly before my dad came home from the Army. We have a photo of her at her bridal shower, sitting under a Christmas tree, showing it off.
I never found the recipe. The people who helped her run the counter and mix cookie dough didn't know how she made her pie crust. No one in my family did either.
I knew some small pieces of the puzzle: She used canola oil instead of shortening. She preferred Pillsbury flour to Gold Medal.
And I knew how much flour to use. My mom kept an odd-shaped measuring cup in her 22-gallon flour bin, and she used two heaping scoopfuls in her crust.
"If I ever lost this," I can hear my mother saying as she held up her faithful plastic whatever-it-was, "I wouldn't know how to make a pie."
I checked the flour bin. The scoop was gone.
The flour-sifter
My mom met my dad, Gene Wimmer, in 1943 on a playground in Howard County, Ind., when she was 9 and he was 10. He was linking arms with girls and flipping them over his back so his friends could look up their skirts.
When he flipped my mom, he broke her collarbone.
My mother was 39 when I was born, and my three brothers were already young men. I was my mom's chance to dress a child in pink and make her sleep in foam hair rollers the night before church. When she washed dishes, I dried.
When she baked, I always did the same job: I sifted her flour.
But I gravitated toward my dad and my brothers. My favorite toy was the CB radio in my dad's semi. My brothers told me purses were for sissies, and I was in college before I could carry one without feeling ridiculous.
I liked to camp and catch crawdads, and more than once my mother had to take me to the home of our neighbor, Dwight Working, so he could remove a tick from behind my ear. Dwight had a knack for tick removal.
I did some time in 4-H, baking and sewing and crafting and taking projects to the county fair. I had little success, though the cookies I baked my first year in 4-H got some compliments from judges.
Jenny Smelser lived down the road and did all the things I should have known how to do: She baked and canned fruit and raised pigs. One summer she named her pigs Bacon and Pork Chop to prove she wasn't too attached to them.
My best effort in 4-H was at the speech contest in 1986. I demonstrated how to measure ingredients. I talked about the importance of measuring liquid ingredients with cups that had spouts and leveling dry ingredients with the flat of a knife.
My mom didn't care much for measuring ingredients or for my speech that told her how. I came in second to a girl who demonstrated how to gift-wrap.
When I graduated from college and moved to Florida, my mother bought me a flour sifter, even though modern flour is presifted. She hoped it might encourage me to pick up where I left off with my baking skills.
Some of my mom's friends managed to keep the bakery open for a year after she died, finally closing the doors after a death in their own family.
Going home became harder after that. Instead of smelling like fresh pies baking in the convection oven, the bakery smelled of the bleach water my dad used to mop the floors.
The recipe seemed lost. Too much time had passed since someone had seen my mother assemble a pie.
A voice from the past
A couple of days before last Christmas, my telephone rang. It was Stubby Etherington, a beekeeper and retired heavy equipment operator in Mount Etna.
He earned his nickname by accidentally shooting off his hand with a shotgun in 1952. He liked to scare little kids by telling them he lost it by sucking his thumb too much.
His real name is Conrad. I've never known him as anything but Stubby.
When I recognized his voice on the phone, I thought someone in Mount Etna had been killed or mauled. Stubby had never called me in my life.
"I was just calling because I lost your mom's pie crust recipe," he told me.
"Stubby?" I began, trying to catch my breath. "You had my mom's pie crust recipe? I mean, you had my mom's pie crust recipe?"
My mom sold Stubby's honey at the bakery. He packaged it in jars labeled "Who's Yer Honey." (Try saying it aloud if you don't get the Hoosier joke.)
He wanted to make a black raspberry pie for Christmas. He assumed I had the recipe.
When he heard about my search, he left me with this promise: "I'll look double-hard for it."
I hung up the phone, thinking about a January day in 1984 when Lancaster Elementary sent us home early because a blizzard was on its way.
Stubby often put his snow plow on his truck after big storms and shoveled the country roads where his friends and neighbors lived. As he passed our house about 4 a.m., he thought he saw a flicker far off the road, where our house sat.
He plowed up our driveway and found the east side of our house in flames. He knocked so hard on the front door that he busted it open. He woke up my family and, when our phone didn't work, drove back to town to summon the Mount Etna Volunteer Fire Department.
Imagine the firefighters' surprise when they arrived in a snowstorm to discover Stubby had already blazed a trail through the snow all the way to our house.
Of course Mom gave him her pie crust recipe.
Getting the word out
The phone call gave me an idea. If Stubby used to have that recipe, surely someone else in Mount Etna did, too.
From Florida, I wrote a note to the Mount Etna United Methodist Church, where my mother had been pianist for 31 years.
Dear friends,
I hope you have all had a safe winter.
I have a favor to ask of you. I have been searching for my mother's pie crust recipe for a couple years now. Apparently, she never wrote it down at the bakery, and no one seems to have it.
I'm hoping she happened to share it with one of you.
Hope my request isn't any trouble. My address is enclosed if any of you can help.
Pastor Tom read my note during church announcements and posted it on the bulletin board.
Pat Searles, a neighbor and one of my mother's closest friends, sent me a recipe she and my mom used a few years ago to bake cobblers at the church.
I was grateful for the lead, but it couldn't have been the right recipe. It was from a cookbook published in 1995, years after my mom had perfected her crust.
I kept looking.
In mom's footsteps
On the second anniversary of my mother's death, I was no closer to finding anyone with the recipe.
The idea of ordering flowers for her grave seemed inappropriate, considering she was never interested in plants that didn't grow on a farm or in a vegetable garden.
I recalled the house plant I gave her for Mother's Day one year. I picked a philodendron because the florist said it would be easy to care for.
Six months later, when I visited and discovered its dead leaves shedding on the bakery floor, I asked my mom why she never watered it. She said she thought it was an artificial plant.
So on the advice of a friend, I honored the anniversary of my mother's death in a more fitting way: I resolved to spend that evening baking my first pie.
I took out my mom's trusty 1953 Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book and compared it to the updated edition I received as a wedding gift in 2000. In 46 years, the standard 10-inch pie crust had dropped a half-teaspoon of salt.
The whole experience was nostalgic: I used my grandmother's red-handled pastry cutter, my mom's favorite brand of flour, and the rolling pin she had given me.
She bought it after trying to bake a pie in the college apartment I shared with four roommates. Unable to find a rolling pin, she poured out the contents of a cheap bottle of vodka she found in our cabinet and used the empty bottle instead. That bottle really did belong to my roommates, though I'm not sure she believed me.
I was pinching pleats into my crust when I remembered how fast my mom worked, spinning pie pans and fluting her edges while chatting up customers in the shop or taking orders on the phone.
I could work that fast if I practiced, I thought. Maybe I could reopen the bakery. It's in my genes.
I took the pie crust out of the oven a couple of minutes early, reasoning that cookies, the only baked goods I had experience with, always taste best undercooked.
I turned the crust into a chocolate-peanut butter cream pie, topping it with the pretty whipped cream peaks my mom used to design. My dad was in town, so I presented him with the pie the next day.
He said my mom would be proud of my effort, but wouldn't think much of my crust.
Turns out that pie crust, unlike cookies, doesn't taste gooey and yummy when you take it out of the oven too soon. It tastes doughy and gummy.
Even if it had been baked thoroughly, the crust still would have tasted flat.
My mother's crust was sweeter, I thought to myself. Maybe she added some sugar.
Don't answer the door
Stubby called again in early March.
"You ever find that recipe?" I asked him.
"You got a pencil?" he replied.
The crust recipe my mom gave Stubby is enough to make four double-crusted pies - probably a small order for her.
7 to 8 cups flour
About 1 cup canola oil
About 1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
"So this is my mom's recipe?" I asked.
"Yeah, that's it," he replied. "Except the salt. I added the salt. Pie crust always tastes better with salt."
Mix the oil and the flour until it reaches what feels like the right consistency, Stubby told me. Add a little more oil or a little more flour until it's just right, he said.
If someone comes to the door while you're mixing the oil and the flour, he cautioned, don't answer it. The oil will separate from the flour, and you'll never get them back together.
I wasn't sure what I thought about Stubby manipulating the recipe by adding some salt. But I thought it was funny that the only exact measurement in the list was the one that came from him and not my mom.
And looky there, I thought as I hung up the phone and stared at the recipe. Her pie crust did have some sugar in it.
A family legacy
Last month, I went back to my mother's bakery to try out Stubby's recipe. I got help from my Aunt Janice, my dad's sister. She's a retired Indiana home economics teacher and the best cook my mother ever knew.
But more important, she learned how to bake from her grandmother, who taught her mother, who taught my mom.
My pie-baking lesson, I reasoned, was coming from good lineage.
I invited my niece Cori to join us. Aunt Janice invited her daughter Angie, my cousin. Cori and I found my mom's stash of aprons in a bakery cupboard, and each of us wore one. At least we looked like real bakers.
This is the part where I'm supposed to say how thrilling it was to roll my mom's pie dough on the stainless-steel countertop of her bakery. How nostalgic it felt to handle the dough she'd made thousands of times. How familiar the finished product tasted: light, flaky, just a little sweet.
But the recipe Stubby gave me didn't work.
The dough wouldn't hold together.
Aunt Janice - even Aunt Janice! - practiced for a solid week and couldn't get the crust to work. She thought it was missing something, maybe a little water.
So, we improvised. Aunt Janice took snippets of pie recipes from her favorite cookbooks to come up with one that resembled my mom's.
She shared her pie-baking tips as we went along: Don't handle the crust too much or it will be tough. Rub a little water around the rim of the bottom crust to make it seal better with the top crust. Add a little milk - just enough to fill the cap of a plastic milk jug - on top of the pie. It makes it brown better.
"I'll tell you something else I do that came from Grandma Curless," she said. She pulled out the measuring spoons and sprinkled a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of flour on top of the bottom crust before adding the filling, so the filling wouldn't seep through and make the bottom soft.
Grandma Curless. She was Aunt Janice's grandmother. My great-grandmother. Cori's great-great grandmother.
All that pie-baking and storytelling and family tradition, combined with the smell of peach pie in the oven and the assembly of the closest thing we could find to my mother's pie crust, got the best of Cori.
I hugged her before her tears could drip into the pie dough.
"I miss her," Cori whispered.
"I miss her, too," I said.
The sympathy card
I called Stubby the other day. He says I wrote down the recipe correctly. Add a little extra canola oil if you have to, he said. But the crust shouldn't need water.
Extra oil. I'll have to try that.
Inside my mom's 1953 edition of Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, I keep a sympathy card from my mom's cousin, Phyllis Salsbery.
I read it to remind myself there might be hope yet for my pies.
"I always enjoyed visiting with your mother whenever we could be together," Phyllis wrote. "I remember when she was about your age she told me she just couldn't bake pies. They just never seemed to turn out right. And to think . . . she became a master pie baker and had her own shop!"
