The Abbeville press and banner. [volume] (Abbeville, S.C.) 1869-1924, 1888-03-07
A PIE FACTORY.
POPULARITY OF A DISTINCT
IVELY AMERICAN PASTRY.
Three Hundred Thousand Gotham
ties Addicted to Its Daily Use
An Immense Bakery
$1,000 Pies Day.

$4,000 Pies Day.
Sullivan street, in the vicinity Of 82
is a tantalizing neighborhood, remarks
the New York Graphic. A soothing and
delicious odor penetrates the air and per
vades the sense. 1t is the smell of fresh
ly baked pies. Through an alley out OF
a courtyard champing horses come
prancing with their fragrant loads in the
| gay wagons behind, leaving . fine
crusty flavor in the air. Sixty wag.
ons roll away with their cupboards full
of pies every morning and roll back
with their cupboards empty every noon,
and the links of fragrance make an un-
broken chain. Fifteen thousand pies
are sent out of this factory every day
just one-ffth of the whole number con-
sumed in this town. As one pie will
give four people piece, there are 300,
600 people here who have pie every day.
The gentleman who runs this benevo-
lent institution has baked pies on the
same spot for forty years and eaten
several every day. He still has first
rate digestion and scoffed at the notion
that evil is concealed in the great Ameri-
can pastry. But 1t must be properly made
crust like snowflake under smoked
glass, fruit that is fresh, juice like syrup
and an oven piping hot. On the fiat side
of paddle, after twenty minutes of
baking, the ideal pie was q feast for q
king or crank. Was flour indigestible 2
No. Was fruit7 Of course not. Was
sugar or lard or. shortening in small
quantities2 We all know better. There
fore, concluded the pie-maker triumph
antly, these elements combined is an
ideal peptic compound. And the pie
eaters of New York and vicinity pay this
excellent man 50, 100 every day to show
| that they back him up. To reach the
Office of the factory one must pass
through q little shop where on a counter
are ranged tempting pies popped hot out
of an oven. The customer who stops to
examine these pies is lost. Up stairs is a
handsome counting room connecting with
the factory in the rear by bridge on the
second story. The fruit room is on the
top floor of the factory, the syrup room
is on the second, the bakers occupy the
first and the huge ovens are in the base
ment. Off to one side are stables, boiler
and engine rooms, and surrounding the
courtyard are the wagon sheds. Pie
baking is a big industry, and the ca
pacity of this single factory, which is the
largest, is 10000 pies. This immense
establishment has grown from a small
bakery where $50 day was a big busi.
ness and the pies were baked In sheet
iron oven.
The product averages, however, u, 1000
pies q day. This requires forty barrels
of apples day, 375 gallons of canned
fruit, 2,5C0 pounds OF. sugar, the same
quantity of lard, twenty-five pounds OF
spice and sixteen barrels of -four. All the
apples used are the famous ct. c. K.'s,"
which are kept sound and good for nine
months in the year. During June, July
and August only canned goods are used.
The apples are the staple of most of the
factory. made pies, though peaches, april
cots, pears, plums, cherries, raspberries,
cranberries and IN fact all fruit in their
season and many the year round, beside
custard and cocoanut, are employed, and
are palatable. The owner of the factory
likes them all, but rather gives prefer
ence to mince. He makes his own mlnce-
meat, and the way he mixes up his meat,
sugar, currants, raisins and apples is
toothsome revelation. Pretty girls pare
the apples with machinery and cut them
up by hand. They are sent below to
the choppers and syrup makers on the
floor below, who work them into what
ever compounds ore wanted and leave
them to mellow in clean and shining
oaken tubs. When the mixture is ripe
it is ladled into the wafery dough and
tucked in costly by the thin top crust.
Half a dozen women have been washing
the tin plates, and they are under the
pie, bright as secured silver, having
been dried IN steam chest. The bakers
wear white caps, and their hands are
white and soft. They are all fat and rosy
and clean, and they manage to turn out
the crusts as quickly as machines. The
whole place is as clean as New England
kitchen or the main street of Brock,
where good Dutchmen all wear felt Slip
pers. Then the pies are carried down to
The ovens ready to be baked-all but the
custards and cocoanuts, which are filed
after they have been put into the ovens.
The huge oven cellar is hungry
schoolboy's vision of Paradise. On
three sides of the oblong room are the
open ovens, lighted by big rehectors
planted in the side and showing
luscious pies browning by the hundred.
A delicious aromatic, mouth watering
perfume fills the room. The very stones
are spicily fragrant and smell eatable;;
All the bakers are fat, and their caps and
aprons are as white as the pie crust. II
= boarding school could be turned loose
In that cellar it would tickle these men
10 fill the boys up. You can see that
they eat pies themselves, and 1T agrees
with them. On the day before Christmas
they worked far into the night to cook
nince pies that carried one and hall
tons of mince meat, in which were 56o
dozen eggs. Itwas q big order, but the
more pies they bake the fatter they get:
For twenty miles around Sullivan street
people cat these pies every day, and there
Is branch factory in Newark and one IN
Philadelphia. There are about thirty
other smaller factories IN the trade,
and most of the small bakeries make q
few pies for themselves. The factories
ON the whole turn out wholesome ana
palatable pastry, and it isn't at all
wonderful that people are iona OF IL.
No other country has the same adVan-
a,& ny1H