A PIE IS A THING OF WONDER. When you offer people a slice, their eyes get wide and they often say, “Really?” as if they don’t deserve the glistening fruit-filled wedge atop hand-rolled, golden pastry.
Then they share a story.
A serving of pie seems to contain more than just crust and filling. It holds memories — of baking with Mom, a favorite diner, a particularly transcendent pie moment.
For Nancy Herring, it’s simple: Pie is part of her identity.
“Oh, French apple, grasshopper, chocolate bar, lemon meringue, strawberry chiffon, banana cream, coconut cream, black bottom, blueberry sour cream,” she ticks them off on both hands. “I’ve probably made more than 10,000 pumpkin pies.”
As one of the pie-baking crew at Mercy Farm, a Christian missionary training center (some called it a commune) north of Fort Collins in the 1970s and early ’80s, Herring learned to make them all, and she still carries the recipes in her head.
She agreed to share (and bake) a couple for us, strapping on a green apron softened by three decades of use. Across the chest is a patch embroidered with “Mercy Farm.”
She reached into the fridge in her modest Adams County home and pulled out a chilled blueberry pie topped with sour cream, placing it on the dining room table next to the high-domed French apple pie cooling on the embroidered tablecloth.
“The pies that I make are about as close as you can get (to the old Mercy Farm pies),” she says. Herring isn’t sure if the pies saved any souls, but “it certainly brought in revenue.”
Until 1985, Mercy Farm Pie Shoppes operated in downtown Denver, the old Northglenn Mall, on Main Street in Longmont and in Cheyenne. (The Christian Ministry Fellowship donated the property to the Denver Rescue Mission, which now calls it Harvest Farm, a rehab program for homeless men.) More than 100 members of the Wellington fellowship baked 350 pies daily, using local eggs and dairy products in the rich fillings.
“We bought eggs by the dozen — some pies had four to seven egg yolks,” says Herring. “Our whipped cream was 40 percent butterfat (most is 32 percent or less) and it stood up on its own. You could make mountains and swirls on the pies.”
The recipes came from Mercy Farm founder James Wilson’s mother, known as Granny Wilson to the members. The religious youth may not have been allowed to smoke, drink or date, but they certainly ate well.
“There were 225 of us, and we grew most of our own food,” Herring recalls. “Chickens, pigs, dairy — we had big pitchers of cream to put in our coffee.”
Food tastes different today, she says, and despite her baking ability, her husband of 36 years, Mitch, can still get into his “hippie clothes.”
Her three daughters have not carried on the pie-baking tradition, probably because their mom is happy to make pies for them. But Herring says her eldest, Keturah, now 30, who was born when the Herrings lived on the farm, would help. “We would put an apron and a hair net on her, and she would follow me around,” says Herring.
She has plenty of pie knowledge to pass on, though.
On mixing the dough: One cup flour to 1/3 cup shortening. You can use a pastry cutter or your hands. I just slide it back and forth between my palms.”
On rolling dough: “The less you play with it, the better.”
On the best pie apple: Jonathan.
How to cut a meringue: “You get a tall glass of hot water and a roll of paper towels. The knife has to be sharp, not serrated. Get it wet — don’t dry it off — and very slowly float that knife through the meringue. Wipe it off and dip it back in the water.”
On pie appreciation: “If you run across a good one, anyone can become a pie lover.”
Kristen Browning-Blas: 303-954-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com
