Latest News

In the Temple of Pie

Category: Greetings From...

Published Date

Written by Larry Levinger

Good pie nourishes not only the body but also the spirit. It requires generous measures of dedication, heaping cupfuls of character, and some grated, all-purpose sentiment, the kind you get in chummy, cozy small towns with family-owned diners and cafes.

Here in Grants Pass, Oregon, at the Powderhorn Café, owners Bob and Kathy Barclay, daughter and son-in-law Tina and Todd, Kathy's sister Barb, and Debbie, who's been waitressing at the café since she was 16, are hard at work with cooks Shawn and Kristina.

Bob is wrapping up a night shift of baking and prepping. Tina and Debbie are waiting tables. Barb and Kathy get folks "coffeed-up," while Todd presides over a grill swaddled with flapjacks the size of Frisbees.

The bell at the pickup station is ringing away and plates of food are twirling from the cooks' hands onto the metal-covered counter, where they're picked up by the waitresses and wedged astride sloping forearms, like shakes on a pitched roof.

Meanwhile, Lynette the hostess seats a steady entry of eager eaters, who, if they want pie, had better order it the minute they sit down. Of the 30-odd flavors (including Sour Cream Raisin, Cantaloupe Cream, Peanut Butter & Jelly, and the spectacular, 9-inch-high Strawberry), many are gone before noon.

Pie Ettiquette When you’re in a pie temple the likes of the Powderhorn Café, a few words on the culture are in order. When huge numbers of Americans once worked the land, pie preserved their perishables. Fruit and meat went into a pie for a portable meal that fed men working in the fields. On a journey, you packed a pie or carried one in the saddlebag. Pie extended the home, the way people lived on the land, and their relationships to one another. When you ate pie, you were nourished by what you had done to endure. You ate pie with others; you ate sitting down, sharing the food, the day, the life. You were nourished by these things, too. Folks are still vigilant about rights like these, and picky about what makes pie honest, hospitable food. Good crust, for example, should prompt a cut that’s felt as a slight, momentary resistance in the hand, followed by a refined, ever-so-smooth paring that detaches a clean forkful without crumbling the remainder of the pie. When speaking of pie, flaky is a positive term. The enigma of great crust, much like the enigma of a beautifully engineered bridge, is a coherence of the supple and the strong. I once overheard a couple of cowboys talking pie in a roadside café in Montana. One of them said, “Pie is a good-natured thing. Not like cake. Cake is lust.” The other cowboy said: “I’ve had bad pie advertised as homemade. If this is homemade, I tell ‘em, it must be a bad home.” Opinions abound. As to styles of dispatching the fare, notice how some people snuggle up to their pie and make big side cuts that cover the entire fork, while others cut thin, precise wedges. Some go right down into the pie, plunging and twisting the fork. A few push hunks around the plate, as if they need to transform the looks of the pie before they can endure the guilt of ingesting it. Many eat half the piece, then sit, elbows on table, hands folded, the pie hidden under them, as if it never happened. Most people eat the back of their pie last. I’ve heard the back of the pie called the buckboard, meaning it ought not to be dense and brittle, but springy, like the seat of a wagon. If you’ve ever had pie crust with a back so hard you couldn’t get a chainsaw through it, you can appreciate good buckboard, which comes from a rightly fashioned crust – the kind the pie builders at the Powderhorn turn out six days a week. – L.L.

Over at the counter, Debbie is cutting slabs of pie. These are six-piece pies, not eight. A hefty chunk of Black Bottom Peanut Butter Cream hesitates on Debbie's spatula, slithers a bit, then glides into place on a plate.

A customer at the counter points his fork at the pie. "I just love that flaky crust," he remarks. "And I never leave the back part." He smiles. "I tell you, these are little works of art. Bite into their Banana Split pie and you'll swear you're eating a banana split. How they do that, I don't know."

A couple of customers — Bob and Diane — warn me that if I haven't found a seat at the Powderhorn by 11:15 A.M., "You can forget lunch, because there's standing room only." Bob and Diane eat here often. They've been doing so since 1988.

"You won't find better pie," Diane declares, "and if your house isn't selling or your grandchild is sick, these people care. Now you can get friendly anywhere. Or nice. But as busy as they are, these folks fuss over you. I've just never seen a grumpy customer in here. And my husband gets better treatment here than he gets at home."

Kathy wanders over, pours fresh coffee, then sits down. "Originally," she explains, "we got friendly with the customers because we didn't know any better! Now É we tend to spoil them."

It's 2 A.M. and Bob is pulling 17 pie shells from the convection oven and setting them on the worktable to cool. "We can buy pie shells all bucked-up," he grants, "but they don't taste the same." Bucked-up is a logging term. Before the Barclays bought the Powderhorn, he worked for a timber company, while Kathy cooked for a restaurant. Then, the Powderhorn came up for sale and they bought it.

By word of mouth, the Powderhorn began to flourish. Archie, a loyal customer, reports that once when he was traveling in Missouri, some folks there heard he was from Grants Pass and said, "Oh! Do you eat at the Powderhorn? Man, those pies!"

Then out-of-town folks started coming in saying, "They told us over at the Chamber of Commerce that if we want pie, we better get here."

While the pie shells cool, Bob loads his Pumpkin and double-crusted Rhubarb, Apple, and Marionberry pies into the oven. "We do this at night," he says, "because the kitchen's too small to do it in the daytime. We just never expected to be this busy. When we first took over the cafŽ, I went over to the electric company to get the power turned on. 'Where is it?' they asked me. That's how well-known the Powderhorn was."

He chuckles. "Now the customers treat the place like it's theirs. One time a guy came in and tried to rob the till. The customers tackled him and held him down on the sidewalk. You don't get loyalty like that unless people's the name of your game.

"It's not just that you make tasty pie; it's that you fellowship it. When people come here to eat, they can visit. If they come with a broken heart, somebody's gonna care."

Bob looks at his watch, then opens the oven. The kitchen fills with a bouquet of cinnamon and cloves. The pies are done and they're bubbling, beautiful, the Pumpkin surfaces lustrous as glass, the fruit pies gurgling through their gaps. "Mmmmmmmm," he purrs. "I done good.

At the counter, Debbie cleaves and excavates slabs of Marionberry pie. "Know what?" she says. "I've been working here long enough to graduate from high school, buy my first car, get married, have kids, and buy my first house. My friends ask me why I don't move up in the world. But I have so many customers I just love to death. If I didn't see them, I'd miss them."

She packs up the plates of pie, along with a couple of today's specials — steak and eggs, homemade soup with a pot-roast sandwich — and totes them out to a table.

At a makeshift station in the corner of the kitchen, Kristina and Kathy are building more pies. They scoop their hands into roomy bowls of flour, shortening, salt and water, then lift, squeeze, fold and turn the dough until it's beady, crumbly. "The less you handle the dough," explains Kathy, "the better. That's why our piecrust is still good after it sets with whipped cream. If you squeeze any more than we're squeezing, the dough gets mooshy."

About 30 to 35 pies a day are built at the Powderhorn. The price? $2.95 a slab; $14.95 a pie, including the box. Upwards of 250 whole pies go out the door during the holidays.

Today, they're building Apple, Apple-Cranberry, Apricot, and Apricot-Pineapple. Still ahead: Pecan, Swiss Almond Mocha, Sour Cream Lemon, Rum and Sour Cream, Almond Joy, Blueberry Cream Cheese, Rocky Road, Apple Rhubarb, Custard. Meanwhile, several Marionberry pies burble away in the oven, their sweet scent straying into the kitchen like candied vapor. "When those berry pies come out of the oven," proclaims Kathy, "you just want to put a big ol' scoop of ice cream on 'em and go to town!"

Kristina weighs one of the pies as part of a quality check. "Four pounds!," she cheers, "That's a lot of pie!"

The pie work continues, progressing with a cadence so dexterous it seems like meditation. Bounteous, beautiful blobs of butter poke through breathing holes that look like elfin moons. The pies look as if they'll roll into the oven by themselves — as if, by the labor, by the very intention and presence in it, they've become things alive.

A fresh Rum and Sour Cream pie appears in the pie case and orders for slabs of it are already underway. "Awesome," sighs a customer sitting next to me at the counter as he tucks into a slice. "Right up there with the best things in life. I don't even need to finish it. I can just sit here and talk about it and bring back how good it is. Some things are like that riding a bicycle. Sex."

He laughs. "It's not the best pie I ever ate, only because my mother is still alive. But when you bite into it, nothing is shattered, cracked, dehydrated, like the pies you get in chain restaurants. There's no aftertaste, either, and nothing tastes greasy, bound, glued together. All the tastes complement each other. Everything's in proportion." He nods to his pie. "I don't know of a restaurant in the U.S. that serves better pie than this."

"That's quite a claim."

"Yup."

"So you were kidding about talking your way through the rest of that Rum Sour Cream?"

He looks at his pie, raises his fork, smiles. "Guess so," he grins.

The Powderhorn Cafe is located at 321 N.E. 6th St. in downtown Grants Pass, Ore. Tel.: 541-479-9403. Breakfast and lunch are served from 6 A.M. to 3 P.M., Monday through Saturday.