Let’s remember when area bakers baked a one-ton apple pie in Yakima, on this day in 1927 (October 15)
One thing I truly love is making unnecessarily large food for publicity. There was a great movie about a Swedish town’s efforts to build that world’s largest sheet cake that played at SIFF last year. But this time it happened long before that and much closer to home.
At HistoryLink, Paula Becker wrote:
On October 15, 1927, Yakima baker Herman Loevenstein and three assistants create and bake a one-ton apple pie to generate publicity for Yakima during National Apple Week. Female students from Yakima High School’s domestic science classes and members of the Camp Fire Girls provide additional assistance and movie newsreel photographers record the event.
The Yakima Morning Herald explained the pie baking impulse:
“By making a pie larger than any ever made before, Yakima and its apples will be advertised in every city in the United States. It will be the biggest advertisement that Yakima apples ever had and millions of people will know of Yakima and its apples who perhaps heretofore have known nothing or very little of this locality.”
The pie was baked in an extra large oven constructed for the occasion on the grounds of the Central School. A local tinsmith created the enormous pie pan. Evaporated Fruits, Inc., a Selah company, furnished dried apples and delivered them to the Libby, McNeil, and Libby Cannery in Yakima. Libby, McNeil, and Libby precooked the apple slices. (Some contemporary newspapers include photographs of crowds of women seated on the ground peeling apples to be used for the pie. It is unclear whether these apples actually did end up in the giant pie or whether the apple peeling was staged for the benefit of the newsreel cameras.) Loevenstein, aided by assistants Joe Kinns, J. P. Manaur, Phil Dietzen, directed the action.
The pie crust was rolled out in sections on a long table using a six-foot rolling pin wielded by six of the girls. The Yakima Morning Herald described this as
“an excellent scene for picture purposes … when the bottom dough was in place several barrels of cooked apples were dumped into the pan while girls with new garden rakes worked the material to a level. Four hundred gallons of apples were required. One hundred pounds of sugar was strewn over the pie by the girls when the filling was completed and Mrs. Thomas Wilson spread two and one-half pounds of cinnamon. When the top crust was in place 20 girls crimped the pastry around the edges of the pan.”
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