Posted on 09/17/2002 5:58:30 PM PDT by tarawa
The pie lady: Still baking after all these years
09/15/02
BURLINGTON — Alice Brown knows how to make a mean apple pie, the kind with a bulging top crust flecked with fork points and an oozing filling that’s tart enough to give it some tang.
At 94, she bustles around her Burlington kitchenette, stoop-shouldered but engagingly girlish. Her hair is as light and puffy as the late summer clouds that float outside her apartment building.
She wears a Christmas apron and leans on a walker. Her feet are wedged into thick, orthopedic shoes with Velcro straps and she admits she would rather be barefoot but she’s afraid she might slip and fall.
On Tuesday, Brown set to work creating yet another pie, this one made from locally-grown Gravensteins. It’s one of 40 to 50 pies she prepares each year as fall approaches. She sets most aside in a 15-cubic-foot freezer to be given out as gifts or passed around at apartment building get-togethers.
“A little bit too thin but that’s OK. It will hold,” Brown said, half to herself, as she unfolded a layer of dough into the base of the pie plate.
Brown, it seems, knows nearly every nuance of America’s favorite pastry.
She’s become so good at making pies — and handing them out — that some consider her “The Pie Lady.”
“They’re great,” enthuses Dick Babington, manager of the Villa Kathleen Apartments, where Brown lives. “There’s nothing wrong with her pie and I think everybody here can vouch for that.”
Brown’s pies have been drawing raves for years. The secret, she confides, is the crust. Where some pies have dull, even doughy, outer shells, someone feasting on one of Brown’s pies can flake away the crust with a fork.
The crust contains a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, a couple of eggs, five spoonfuls of water and plenty of flour, all of it beaten by hand and flattened with a glass rolling pin.
Brown started baking pies when she was 12 years old. Born in 1907, the third of seven children, she eventually went to work as a cook at the old Hansen House. The vintage home was recently sold by the Burlington-Edison School District and will be moved west of Interstate 5, freeing up space for the high school’s future growth.
But when Brown was a teenager the house was the hub of a working farm. She honed her cooking skills there and at other farmhouses, all of the money she earned going back to her large family.
She baked bread and made buns, something she still does today. Brown wouldn’t think of buying noodles. She whips up her own with a few eggs and flour.
Just weeks from turning 21, she married Herbert Dodge, her late husband of 46 years. She remarried in her 60s and outlived her second husband, S. Joe Brown, as well.
Both men enjoyed her pies, especially apple and mincemeat.
Mincemeat is not so popular these days. It consists mostly of venison, raisins and currants.
Brown, who has long enjoyed hunting, insists that she could easily shoot some more deer meat with a 30-30 rifle, if only her son would drive her up to the mountains.
“Put me in your pickup with my walker and a hunting knife and I’ll sit on a log,” she said. “I’ll get a deer.”
These days, she contents herself with making apple pies.
She likes using locally grown apples. Alan and Rose Merritt, Bow area apple growers, began taking her a box of their fresh-grown apples each year after Brown called, complaining she could no longer drive.
“She called us about three years ago,” said Rose Merritt. “She said, ‘Have you got any of them Gravensteins? I can’t drive honey, can you bring me a box?’”
So Merritt began ferrying them into Burlington, making Brown the grower’s sole special-delivery customer.
“She just fell in love with us and we fell in love with her,” Merritt said.
And fell in love with her pies.
After all, pies are what keeps Brown going, despite 14 surgeries, eye problems and other infirmities that come with witnessing nine decades come and go. When she isn’t creating pies, she turns to her other hobby, creating lap robes made of brightly colored yarn.
“I feel if I keep my mind going, I won’t get senile,” she said.
Brown’s hands are firm as she takes a knife and deftly curls away the blush of apple skin, then carves the fruit into elegant half-moons.
“A lot dump the apples right in but you got a lot of holes to fill up,” said Brown, as if she were talking as much about time as the art of pie-making.
Any other life lessons?
Don’t skimp on the sugar and cinnamon.
My wife makes a good apple pie but hasn't mastered the flakey crust but her appolesauce is a killer.
OMG...my wife leads a double life...:-). I asked her what made crust flaky and she feingned hearing loss.
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