Penn Dutch pies, still hot

It was a recent tour of Pennsylvania Dutch (which is to say, German) household objects at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, chiefly a wall of 200-year-old fired-clay pie plates, that put me in mind of sharp-tongued Verna Dietrich.

The guide had taken care to note that these particular plates, etched with tulips and stags and Prussian-ish double-headed birds, were show pieces, most likely delivered with a pie on board, but not used in their daily baking.

The more utilitarian pieces typically didn't last: Pennsylvania's early German settlers were so smitten with pie - with the bountiful fruit trees and farms of their own - that they could apparently down a pie or two with every meal.

"Who makes all those pies

you

carry?" I asked Verna Dietrich when I caught up with her at the family's country store in Krumsville, Berks County.

Well, nobody makes them for Dietrich's, she reminded me: They make their own, right in the back.

They're busy with a lot more, of course. On the morning I drove up they were cutting the hams out of fresh-killed hogs. The tenderloins for sale were still warm.

They make prize scrapple, too, and all manner of sausage, pork roasts and leathery, laced-up footballs stuffed with sweet Lebanon bologna and hung to smoke in the smokehouse.

And here's the food cycle that might not occur at first blush: They salvage the rendered lard, creamy and white - a legendary lard called "leaf lard" from near the kidney. This is the secret ingredient in Dietrich's pie kitchen. Its lard is known for making tender piecrust.

"Where do you get the recipes?" I asked Dietrich, who in person has an intimidating and matriarchal cast of feature.

"They're old recipes," she snapped. "Old family recipes. Church recipes." And then reprovingly: "They're not microwave recipes."

"Are they Pennsylvania Dutch?"

"What else?"

"Do you make them in those earthenware pie plates?"

"No, no. Real Pennsylvania Dutch pie is in patty pans, just round tin pans. Not that redware they came out with."

What kind of pie did she have?

Well, every kind! They bake to order. And they make extras you can buy still hot out of the oven, if you happen to get there when they come out.

Some were laid out on a table near the cash register. But that was just a smattering: Dietrich started enumerating the full pie line.

There is blueberry crumb, which is her personal favorite of the crumb family, which includes strawberry-rhubarb crumb and apple (Granny Smith) crumb, and cherry and huckleberry - foraged in the mountains - crumb and strawberry crumb and peach crumb. "Did I say rhubarb?"

Then there's a fine, cinnamony apple "with a lid." And a big softball of an apple dumpling. And mincemeat, which is a fine mince of beef and various citrus and raisins they make on premises and which, blessedly, is not cloyingly sweet. There are egg-custard pies, as well - a coconut custard and an astonishingly tasty black raspberry custard, and a red raspberry custard, and blueberry custard, peach, cherry and molasses custard, and a black walnut custard that, frankly, is overly subtle. And a molasses-coconut custard.

There is much more: Lemon sponge and lemon meringue, and coconut, chocolate and vanilla cream, and a crispy-topped local black walnut pie without any dairy that can keep for weeks just like a pecan pie, which it is related to. And a pageant of shoofly pies - wet-bottom, honey, lemon ("which is what they sometimes call Montgomery Pie") and vanilla and chocolate versions of shoofly pie, some cut in halves, the better to reveal their inner beauty.

And so on.

By some accounts, in fact, it was the long-ago convergence of Pennsylvania's peace-seeking German immigrants with the New World's Edenic bounty that first gave rise to the fruit pie as a particularly, and enduringly, American totem.

Should you feel, on occasion, that that tradition is fading or in jeopardy, a road trip to Krumsville is a surefire corrective and tonic.

Krumsville, Pa.

(Exit 40 off I-78)

610-756-6344

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