The once-predominantly French-Canadian Catholic parish cooks up an autumn storm, using the tourtière as its major fund-raiser. Watch video
At the St. John the Baptist Pastoral Center in Ludlow, clockwise, Bernadette Bourbeau, Fabiola Gamache, Ruth Makowicz and Loretta Pancione, all volunteers from Ludlow, prepare the French meat pies for their topping for the 34th annual St. Elizabeth's Church fund-raiser.LUDLOW - By sheer volume alone, it sounds like it could be a recipe for disaster:
Three weeks, more than 30,000 individual meat pies.
The crust is made from scratch, and each pie’s details done by hand, molding the crusts into small tins, brushing them with milk to ensure a good seal between tops and bottoms and then crimping the edges with fingers - not forks - for the perfect presentation.
For volunteers like Gisele Pelletier, it’s clearly a labor of love that goes on here each October at the St. John the Baptist Pastoral Center on Hubbard Street.
Talk to enough of them, and you learn the story behind their story, how it’s about their faith, working together, helping others and feeding their flock.
Pelletier is among close to 100 volunteers, some of whom rise before dawn every weekday morning for the three weeks, arrive by 6:30 and stay until early afternoon to be part of a pie sale that’s reached almost epic proportions.
The older ones - Ories Panacione, 94, who comes most days after attending 7:30 Mass in St. Elizabeth’s Church next door, holds the “most senior” honor - work right along side the younger ones. The generations banter back and forth, they enjoy music, share a lunchtime meal - and savor their three decades of success.
In a town probably best known for all things Portuguese, this once predominantly French-Canadian Catholic parish cooks up a storm this time of year, using the meat pie - or tourtière - as the basis for its major fund-raiser.
They now cook in a building they helped finance. “It was that which bought this,” says Jeanette Nolan simply and to the point as she talks about the spacious center with its brand-new kitchen.
The pie makers contributed some $500,000 over the years to the fund that helped build the more-than-$1 million parish center. It used to be that they worked in the third-floor auditorium of the 1920s-vintage school next door.
One thing remains constant. They still use the “secret recipe” handed down by Emma Couture, grandmother to Nolan and her cousin, Jean Bergeron, who are among the stalwarts of today’s pie-making. Their mothers and aunt - three sisters among a family of 12 children - helped begin the effort with the recipe perfected in the kitchen of a house right across the street. “Noella’s Kitchen” at the pastoral center pays homage as a legacy to one of them.
Bergeron says she’s the keeper of the recipe; she confides a story about the woman who arrived one year to buy pies and plied her for the ingredients. “Allspice? No. Parsley? No. I looked up and said, ‘Lord, you’ve got to help me with this one.’ I told the woman, ‘The recipe is in my head and won’t come out.’ She left, and I said, ‘Thanks, Lord,’” Bergeron recalled.
The most they’ll reveal about ingredients is that the pie filling uses 85-percent lean ground beef, ground pork, their spice mixture and a “little water” to help with mixing the meat as it cooks.
What began as a home-based effort with about 100 pies a season, now averages some 2,500 pies each day over the three weeks.
Today, it’s James Wainwright who oversees the operation. Old-timers like Nolan and Bergeron will tell you this “younger man” of Scottish heritage has worked very hard to ensure the survival of their fund-raiser. He’s been on board for about 10 years.
Retired from an information security job at Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., Wainwright’s working on computerized record-keeping and strategizing ways to streamline the works. He’s got the “cooling room” outfitted with new racks created from chicken wire and 2-by-4s to help cool pies in two hours or less.
Wainwright set a modest goal for this year’s effort, 31,500 pies; his committee reached out to all 96 parishes in the Roman Catholic Diocese to for potential pie orders, perhaps to be resold as fund-raisers for the other parishes.
“Three took us up on the offer, one for 200 pies, another for 150 and a third for 500,” Wainwright said. He’s hoping this plan will bear more fruit next year. “If we’d had all 96 parishes order this year, we’d have been in trouble,” he said with a grin.
Every piece of the operation has its history, right down to the wooden-handled stamp that is used to embellish each crust with “SJB” - for St. John the Baptist. The stamp was created by Emile Pelletier, Gisele Pelletier’s husband.
As it is, the operation bakes more pies each day than they know they’ll sell, just because “we have no fear we won’t be able to sell them,” Wainwright said. It also gains them a start on the next day’s orders. More than enough people either walk through the door or call in orders to ensure not a single morsel will go to waste. (The group also delivers pies to homebound members of the parish and freeze some for one of their quarterly meals at which they serve the homeless.)
Can the pie-making continue? Some of Emma Couture’s great- and great-grandchildren are in the mix of things, and a new generation of volunteers is being brought into the fold from the school next door.
Gary Bourbeau, development director at St. John the Baptist School, is seeing to that part of the equation. He grew up helping with the piemaking, and his mother’s part of the regular crew.
Bourbeau is in charge of organizing the youngest volunteers, who arrive as soon as they step off their buses and work until just before 8 a.m. when school starts.
The first day of this year’s operation, there was so much enthusiasm from the school - 45 children came through the door that morning - that Bourbeau had to set up a system where about 18 to 20 young people join the effort each day.
The lessons for the new generation are simple, Bourbeau said; “When you work together, there’s a sense of community. It’s a charitable thing, a way to put your faith into action. You’re doing it because it’s a nice thing to do.”
Twelve-year-old Krista Jasek is an example of how the tradition’s taking hold. She’s in her second year of volunteering.
“I just like helping out people,” Krista said as she helped mold the crusts into the tins this particular morning. “And, making the pies is fun. They’re really yummy.”