DUMMERSTON — The first clue that you are in the right place appears before you even get to the door: it's the unmistakable aroma of hot apple pie.
The brilliant combination of fat and flour, sweet-tart apples, and warming spices creates an invisible cloud that wafts through the screen door of the Dummerston Congregational Church's basement kitchen.
It's Thursday morning, a week-and-a-half before the church's biggest fundraising event, Dummerston's famous Apple Pie Festival. In the church kitchen, a team of volunteers works toward the goal of preparing, assembling, and baking 1,500 pies for the Oct. 11 event. They are giving themselves nine days to do it.
In The Commons' version of embedded journalism, I am there to help.
I walk in and see Bess Richardson and Ruth Barton checking on a stack of three pizza ovens.
“These three ovens hold 12 nine-inch pies each,” Richardson says, noting the ovens were brought in “years ago” by a local who worked in the kitchen supply business.
She and Barton point out the modified pizza peel, waiting in a bucket to the right of the oven. They tell me Charlie Bolster “cut it down years ago to fit under the pies."
“One pie ends up falling on the floor every year as it comes out of the oven,” John Wilcox says, as he takes a brief break from stuffing sugared-and-spiced apple chunks into freshly-rolled pie bottoms.
“When that happens, we all cheer,” Wilcox says, adding, “What else can you do?"
“Plus, when it happens, then we know it's over - the one pie of the year has fallen on the floor,” he says.
As I make my way down the length of the room to the beginning of the assembly line, I see two men in hats, sitting at a table. One has a huge knife, and the other has what looks like a fun toy.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” I say, before introducing myself.
“It is a good morning,” booms Hugh Goldsmith, the man with the big knife.
“You came to the right table!” he adds, before cleaving a peeled apple in half.
He motions to his table-mate, Merrill Barton, the man operating the peeler. As Barton cranks the handle round and round, a whole apple quickly sheds its skin, in one long, spiraled ribbon.
Goldsmith tells me when he was a schoolteacher, Barton was one of his students.
“You don't believe me, do you?” Goldsmith says, as Barton smiles.
The two men lob gentle jokes at one another, never pausing their production.
“We do have fun here,” Goldsmith says, in case one weren't already convinced.
At a long table just a few feet away, a team of workers takes trays of the apples Barton and Goldsmith have just peeled and halved, and breaks them down further.
Using paring knives, they remove the cores and any remaining bits of skin, and cut them into thick slices before piling them back onto the trays and then shuttling them to the next station.
When I ask the volunteers at this station if we can add up the number of years every person has worked making pies for the festival, for a table-wide total, they shout, almost in unison, “we can't count that high!"
“Forever!” says Lillian Brookes.
“This is the 46th year, according to the records I have,” Bess Richardson, says, calling over from where she is rolling out pie tops, neatly tucking the pliable dough around the just-stuffed pie's perimeter.
Cathy Miller, whose mother, Gladys Miller, was instrumental in organizing the yearly pie-assemblies before she passed away, chimes in.
“When we started in 1969, we made them in people's houses, right?” she asks.
“Yes!” comes a chorus, in response.
Miller says that during pie-fest time, “we never saw our mother."
These days, Dwight Miller Orchards still has a hand in the festival. In addition to Cathy's pie-making skills, her brother Read and his wife, Malah, and their children, provide all the apples for pie-fest. That's roughly 90 bushels'-worth, currently of the Cortland variety.
Meanwhile, back at the coring-and-slicing table, Carolyn Goldsmith tells me she performs this task every year.
Sitting next to Carolyn is Bobbie Wendell, who, as she slices, says she switches between this job and making pie crust.
“Sometimes you get tired of standing,” Cathy Miller notes.
“The church youth group makes the ice cream,” that comes as an option on Apple Pie Festival day, says Wendell.
She says they use an old-fashioned, hand-cranked ice cream freezer.
“I make the custard for it,” Wendell says, noting it all happens over at Randy Hickins's Mountain Mowings Farm in the big steam kettle.
She mixes five batches of five gallons of custard each, “but it makes more than 25 gallons of ice cream because it expands."
Over near the ovens, all the parts come together.
In a huge, plastic-lined barrel, a grainy mix of fat and flour awaits its fate.
“We make a barrel full of pie crust mix a day,” Ruth Barton says, noting “that's nine barrels for nine days."
Chet Wendell stood at the counter by the window, rolling out pie bottoms and pushing them into tins.
“May I take your picture?” I ask him.
He consents, but is concerned I'll capture him making an error.
“Chet doesn't make mistakes,” Richardson says from the kitchen island, where she, Cindy Wilcox, and James Brown top the pies John Wilcox has just stuffed.
Each pie-topper places their signature on their pie, in the form of a carving or an applique made of rolled-out dough.
Cindy Wilcox's trademark of sorts is a quartet of apples, which she presses from the rolled-out dough using a cookie-cutter.
Brown's insignia is punny: it's a large mathematical “pi” symbol.
“I don't have time to put the numbers all the way around the pie,” Brown says.
Brown has been helping make pies for five years, and notes, “that makes me 30 years short” from nearly everyone else assembling pies in the church basement.
“I wouldn't miss it for the world,” he says.
After I am satisfied I have taken plenty of photographs and scribbled copious notes, I ask Richardson if I can help prepare some pies. I admit to some nervousness. Although I am a capable cook, my baking experiments have resembled just that: experiments, not food.
She directs me to the coring-and-slicing table, where I take a seat and follow those more experienced than I.
A few minutes later, Richardson calls me over to the oven for the removal of the hot pies. She knows I don't want to miss it.
As the pies are carefully shuttled from the oven to the cooling racks, I wonder if today will be pie-on-the-floor day.
Not this time. I'm half-relieved, half-disappointed to miss the event.
As I look at the clock and realize I need to leave for my next adventure, Cathy Miller asks me, “Do you have time for a slice of pie?"
Who doesn't?
“Twist my arm, Cathy,” I say.
There's always time for a slice of pie.