Growing up on a farm, having been babysat as a small child at a farm, and living in farm country there was no shortage of women who could make some pretty amazing pies. There was a woman in town whose name was Sandy. “she makes the best pies”, people would say. As I got older I met another lady named Julie who made the best pies. She had a huge family and would bake all the pies for the holidays. Somewhere around 30 of them just for thanksgiving. She would do this in her tiny farmhouse kitchen.
Pies were often made with fresh fruit of the season. The most common being a rhubarb custard in spring, blueberry in July and Apple in the fall. Preserved apples and blueberry’s were used in the winter months when low cost fruit was unavailable.
How to Make Bulk amount of Pie Crust at Home
There was a neighbor named Karla, who had many sisters, and her and sisters would gather together once a year and make a bulk amount of pie crusts for each one of them to store in the freezer for the year. This was a great ways to have pie crust on hand for any quick prep pie dessert. The recipe used 7up as an ingredient and was made with large professional mixers. Karla and one of her sisters worked for the local highschool and they would use the school kitchen to make it all happen.
Award Winning Pie Crust
5 pounds of flour
3 pound can of Crisco
1 TB salt
Cut these three ingredients together
2 cans 7up
Put 3/4c finished dough in Ziplock bags and freeze
Makes 20 – 3/4c crusts
This recipe cracks me up. It came to me very vague like that but it turns out great every time.
How Great Grandma Make Her Best Pie Crust
It seems like Grandmas simplified everything. Nothing seemed to difficult, or complicated. They made baking look effortless and easy. Perhaps that’s because of the simplicity of ingredients they used. Common pantry goods were all they had so it was all they needed.
Right down to tossing unmeasured ingredients into a bowl, Grandma easily whipped up a pie crust. It would all come together perfectly and would always turn out. She would rattle it off so quickly there was hardly a chance to grab a pen and write it down.
Grandma used flour, milk and oil as the main ingredients in her recipe. This feels very unfamiliar to pie crust, since milk was never a common pie making ingredient. It’s always ice cold water. This Grandma lived in the big city and not in farm country so that’s why I think she used oil instead of lard. In the country, you always had leaf lard on hand from butchering pigs in the fall. It was stored in the cellar and used throughout the year until you butchered again. So oil was never used in common farmhouse pie recipes.
City Grandma Pie Crust
2 cups flour
1/2 cup oil
1/4 cup milk
1 tsp salt
How To Make a Mud Pie
Mud Pies are common to the little hands. Any child can quickly whip up the most beautiful and delicious mud in an instant. Give them and old pie tin and off they go. Making mud and finding the most beautiful rocks and flowers to make their creations. Then they try to sell them to you!
“The red rocks are strawberries, the yellow rocks are banana’s and the ones with black spots are pepper!” I mean who doesn’t love bananas and pepper right?
Children are such creative beings created by such an amazing creator. Don’t miss out on encouraging creativity with a little mud and water. There was nothing I loved more than watching my kids sit in the gravel driveway picking their favorite rocks. Talk about simplicity and a good life on the farm!