Pies baked, boxed and delivered to relief sale

The smells of pies baking filled two church buildings last week, as a group of women used the kitchens of both Cornerstone Community Church campuses, on Hunter Road and Niagara Stone Road.

The pies were put together assembly-line style in the larger Hunter Road kitchen, but some were transported to the Virgil location to be baked and boxed, making the process a little faster, explained Dorothy Soo-Wiens, one of the organizers of the baking.

The women baked a total of 223 pies. More than 80 were sold in the community, the remainder loaded up and delivered by Soo-Wiens Friday afternoon to the New Hamburg Fairgrounds for the annual Mennonite Relief Sale, which is held over the weekend.

“People line up at 5:30 p.m. Friday just to get the pies as they get delivered,” she says.

Asked about where the recipes for the dough and fillings come from, Soo-Wiens says most of the “tried and true recipes” the women use are passed down from a cookbook called The Mennonite Treasury of Recipes. “I’m sure every Mennonite family has this recipe book. I got this for a wedding shower from Dorothea Enns (of Enns Battery and Tires) 32 years ago.”

The recipes have been passed on from the ladies from the church who baked pies decades ago, and who are now in their 80s and 90s, she says.

“Kathy Dyck and I have fine-tuned the dough and filling recipes but they are the originals from when this first started. Erna Falk recruited me to take over from her years ago.”

The fillings included peach-rhubarb, blackberry, blackberry-peach,  blackberry-rhubarb, peach, and a few grape pies, which everyone loves, says Soo-Wiens.

The pies from Cornerstone raised about $2,500 for the relief sale, she says.

Soo-Wiens heard from the organizer of the pie sale in New Hamburg that this year only five churches participated in baking pies as compared to pre-COVID, when there were seven. “This year there were about 1,200 pies that were contributed through the five churches — two Markham Mennonite churches, two churches in Kitchener and our Cornerstone Community Church,” she says.

In all, $333,000 was raised on Friday and Saturday for the Mennonite Central Committee, $15,450 coming from pie sales.

The New Hamburg Relief Sale, best known for its handmade quilts, raises money for relief from hunger, poverty and natural disasters, and for development and peace-building activities with proceeds forwarded to the Mennonite Central Committee, a not-for-profit relief, service and development and peace agency of the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in North America.