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Pie chef makes nearly lost art look like a piece of cake
Sunday, January 21, 2001 By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Tuesday is National Pie Day, which men of expansive vision and pants founded two decades ago to celebrate a cherished yet steadily declining American icon.
Alas, real made-from-scratch pie is scarcer than ever.
But happily, a handful of us still know the precious pie-making art and practice it. They are ever fewer and farther between, but places still exist where pie day is every day.
One is Dean's Diner, a real-deal stainless steel Fodero diner in Blairsville, Indiana County, about 40 miles east of Pittsburgh. Emerson Dean, who started a diner nearby in 1934, opened this one beside Route 22 just days after the new four-lane opened in 1953.
He never pondered whether to serve pie. As with coffee, he had to.
Same with his son, Darrell, who now runs what is a regional institution, in large part because of its pie.
Dean's still has a pie baker, Cathy Deemer, who five days a week gets up by 3:15 a.m. to get to work by 4.
She starts at the cold glass pie cases, which give her creations prime, bright-lit billing at both ends of the counter out front. After jotting on a napkin how many pieces are left from the day before, she heads to the back kitchen and fires up the ovens. Before long, waitresses arriving from outside can lay their hands on her to warm them.
After whipping up two dozen doughnuts, she starts making pies. Really making them, from flour and shortening and milk and eggs, the way hardly anyone does anymore.
"Every place has 'homemade pie,'" she says, shaking her head. "I guess people say 'homemade' because they stick it in the oven."
There's a lot she has to do before that. Depending on the day, there is pastry to make, and all the fillings. She starts from scratch, with a few allowances -- such as some frozen, precut fruit -- since she makes 20 to 40 to 60 pies at a time.
On this recent weekday, she'll bake 19. January is slow, piewise, but it picks up, she quips, "when everyone forgets their resolutions and goes back to normal life."
This is her life, making pies. She started 15 years ago, at age 19. Customers who want to talk pie still are surprised to meet a ponytailed blonde instead of a gray granny.
However timeless, pie is seasonal, and in winter, she sticks to "basics" -- apple, apricot, blueberry, cherry, peach and raisin, and the creams: lemon meringue; "graham," which is vanilla pudding in a graham cracker crumb crust; plus variations of that including chocolate, peanut butter, chocolate-peanut butter, banana and coconut.
Coconut is the top seller, then apple, she says, stationed at the 8-foot pie table so seasoned that a trough has been worn into the silky wood.
Deemer's domain is a delight to the senses, from the sight of a sugar-topped mountain of blueberries to the cinnamony scent of bubbling apples to the subtly changing slapping sound as the meringue from 50 egg whites climbs in the mixer.
But the marvel is the pie maker. She can roll out and tuck on a top crust, then, spinning the pie, use both hands to whisk off the excess and both thumbs to artfully flute the rim -- in just over a minute.
So the waitresses know which is which before they cut the pies (into hefty sixths), she decorates each variety with distinctive markings: Little x's, like bird footprints, for peach; S squiggles for apple. It's a lost pie language that she learned from the pie maker before her.
Likewise, with her fingers, she varies the wave patterns of the meringue toppings that she mounds on with her hands. "I like people to tell me they look nice."
She uses no mechanical timer, just smell, to know just when to pull the pies from the oven and slide them onto the cooling rack in all their golden-brown glory.
By 9:30 a.m., the waitresses start coming back for the cream pies.
One asks, "They hot?"
"Yeah," Deemer says, which means that eager customer is just going to have to wait or come back.
Pie has a powerful pull on people. Owner Darrell Dean, who happened to reconnect with the woman who became his second wife when she came in for a slice, wouldn't think of messing with the pie.
Of Deemer, he says, "She's very important to us."
Indeed she is.
On National Pie Day, let us lift our forks not just to pie, but to the people who still make it -- real.
Bob Batz Jr. is a PG feature writer who loves making and eating pie so much that he shares with a similarly flaky friend the nickname, "Crust." In 1998, he covered the National Pie Championships in Boulder, Colo. His favorite pie is gooseberry.
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