Ten pies sat on a table outside the kitchen of the Salant Family Ranch—Marion Hadden’s pear crostata, Kathy Horner’s blueberry-peach pie, and Joy Rogalla’s Montgomery cherry pie, among others. Potential pie-auction bidders walked around the display, eyeing the pies. So did the farm dog, Yosh. “No, Yosh! Down!” After that one trial nip, a guard kept firm watch.
Each pie had a card with its story to help the auctioneer sell it: homemade sourdough crust (Kim Zwemer-Margulis); “nothing fancy, just apples from our tree, a little sugar, a little cinnamon, and a butter-Crisco crust” (Priscilla Weaver); “…based on an old family internet recipe that has been in the family for weeks, if not days” (Sam Dennis).
The pie auction itself would cap the barbecue dinner at the Salant Family Ranch, itself the penultimate event of A Greater Applegate’s (AGA) Jacksaphine County Fair the third week of September. One hundred diners sat at tables, elegantly set with tablecloths and jars of flowers, on a green lawn overlooking the bucolic scene of cows grazing under forested hills. “All the fixin’s” crowned the star of the dinner, Salant-beef hamburgers. The band, a semi-acoustic version of Electric Eel, kept the mood lively. Wines from Woodridge Creek Winery and pear cider from Blossom Barn added to the festivities.
After drinks and dinner—the auction. Jim Reiland, auction organizer, explained the process, then introduced Kathy Horner to read Priscilla Weaver’s piece about the history of pie competitions in the Little Applegate. It was the Buncom Babes, Priscilla and Kathy among them, who started this years-long tradition. The AGA auction was in that vein.
Appetites, already piqued by the show-off beauty of the pies, were further whetted by descriptions the auctioneer, Collin Braley, a musician and singer with the band, gave each. Collin occasionally encouraged bidders by breaking into a pie-related song.
Competition was keen. Bids over $100 got a bonus of 1.5 quarts of ice cream, donated by Sam Dennis and Liz Shen. Bidding wars broke out. One bidder even bid against himself, since the more he was willing to pay, the more someone else wanted the pie, thus increasing the gain for AGA.
The winningest pie was Joy Rogalla’s cherry pie, which went for a whopping $275. The whole table of Kim and Joseph Hurley thought the pie was well worth the price, not only for its deliciousness but also for its rarity. Joy had used cherries from her own Montgomery cherry tree—“a well-known pie cherry,” she said, “loved by both people and birds, which is why we rarely harvest enough cherries for pie!”
Kim Hurley had herself made a pie, a gluten-free apple crumble, won by Max Unger. It came in a beautiful red pie dish from Born Again in the Ruch Plaza. Liz Shen’s Asian pear pie, her “ode to my ancestors” because it was a family favorite,
was happily devoured—with ice cream; it went for $150—by Tony Branham’s table. Liz had called it a “pie lie” because it was actually a pie version of an Italian pear cake, “an incredible pear and almond torte,” Tony said. Chad Sobotha and Rachel Owings, from Ashland, were among the lucky recipients of Peter Salant’s win, Jim Reiland’s lattice-top apple pie. They called it a “hiker’s pie” (“We’re ready to go hiking now!”) and praised it for its “hint of lemon that balanced the sweetness of the apples and its wholesome crust.” Paul Tipton bought Kim Margulis’s pie—golden delicious apples and Asian and Bartlett pears—“with flourishes,” Paul said, adding that it was especially tasty with ice cream. Joan Peterson’s bid won my deep-dish apple pie that had won the Pyrofax Gas Company’s Teenage Baking Contest in 1962. “It was absolutely delicious,” Joan said. “It put me on another planet.” Marion Hadden agreed, adding that “the cheese-apples were so cool”—the little rolled-up balls of cheese made to look like little apples that perched in rows atop the pie.
Thanks to the bidders and the bakers, the ice cream donor, the auctioneer, and the organizer, the pie auction was a great success, not only for the $1100 it brought in for A Greater Applegate but for the happy grins on the faces of all pie eaters.
Courtesy of the Applegater
By Diana Coogle
diana@applegater.org
