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Easter Lunney of Fort Wayne has a recipe for a zucchini apple pie that doesn’t use apples but tastes just like a homemade apple pie.
Lunney, 85, remembers the time she took one of her zucchini apple pies home to southern West Virginia for a dinner. At one point, she offered it to friends, and one woman said, “Oh, my husband doesn’t like zucchini.”
He tried it anyway. His thoughts?
“That’s the best apple pie.”
Lunney says her name came about because she was born on an Easter Sunday. Every Easter, her mother, the late Mary Susan Harvey Meadows, would dye feed sacks yellow and make her a dress from them, she says.
“That’s my favorite color,” she says fondly.
Lunney was 11 when her mother died of cancer in her 30s. Her older sister was married and had moved away, so that left Lunney, the oldest girl, to care for a family that included five children.
They lived on a small farm between the towns of Beckley and Hinton in southern West Virginia, she says.
“From my house to Beckley, it was 40 miles. From my home to the blacktop road, it was five miles,” she says.
When her mother was alive, Lunney says, “It wasn’t nothing for Mom to get up and make homemade pancakes and biscuits. We’d have bacon or ham and eggs, biscuits and gravy for breakfast. We had homemade molasses.”
She says she remembers eating leftovers from breakfast as an after-school snack.
“When I’d come home from school, we had an oven with a warming closet. If there was a piece of leftover bacon, cold beans and a biscuit or cornbread,” she says. “Oh, that tasted good heated up.
“You wouldn’t believe what we stored up in the fall for winter,” Lunney says.
“In the back bedroom, in the left-hand corner, it was stuffed with stone jars filled with molasses. We dried apples and made dried apple pies, and, boy, were those good!”
Because the family lived so far from town, storing fruits and vegetables was a necessity, Lunney said.
“Dad (the late William Riley Meadows) would dig a deep hole (outside) and line it with boards and straw and add dirt, and inside was cabbage, potatoes and apples. He would cover it,” she says. “Onions were dried and hung up.”
According to Lunney, you didn’t run to the grocery store if you ran out of something.
“We made everything. We made homemade hominy. We raised a little of everything. We raised buckwheat for pancakes. We had cows for milk. We butchered our own meat. I’ve eaten all kinds of meat: ground hog, squirrel (and) rabbit.
“Also, we … had a peach orchard, and we canned the peaches, blackberries; we made jams and jellies. We made pumpkin butter and apple butter. We canned almost everything,” Lunney says.
Instead of using quart and pint jars for canning, Lunney says they used half-gallon containers.
“ ’Cause the family was so large. A quart didn’t make enough,” she says.
Because they didn’t have a refrigerator, Lunney’s mother had a creative way to keep the milk cool, she said.
“We had a trough-like thing (outside), and (mom) would draw water out of the well and keep water in the (trough) to keep milk cold. We milked the cows twice a day. When the milk started turning sour, we’d make butter.”
Lunney speaks of her mother as “a real sweetheart.”
“She never had like what I have, washer and dryer,” she says. “Our beds were big feed sacks filled with straw or hay.”
Summing everything up, Lunney says, “All the time I spent – what little time I had with her – all the things I learned, the cooking and cleaning.
“She was a neat, clean person. If my uncle stopped by, and if she didn’t have a broom in her hand, he’d go and get it and hand it to her. We didn’t have carpet. We cleaned the wood floors with lye soap. She made homemade soap.”
6 cups sliced zucchini
3 tablespoons lemon juice
Dash of salt
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
Dash of nutmeg
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 (9-inch) unbaked pie crusts
6 teaspoons butter
Boil sliced zucchini in water until tender. Drain. Mix with lemon juice and salt. In a separate bowl, mix sugar, cinnamon, cream of tartar, nutmeg, flour and cornstarch. Add zucchini and mix well. Fill one crust with filling. Dot with butter. Add top crust. Bake in oven at 400 degrees for 40 minutes or until brown. Makes 6 to 8 servings.
1 1/2 cups zucchini
3/4 to 1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1 egg
2 tablespoons flour
1 1/2 tablespoons melted margarine
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
9-inch unbaked pie shell
Slice and cook zucchini in water for 10 minutes or until tender. Drain. Add the remaining ingredients, except pie shell, and beat well. You may do this with a blender. Pour mixture into pie shell and bake in oven at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees and continue baking for 30 to 40 minutes. Makes 6 to 8 servings.
8 cups corn, cut off the cob
1 stick butter or margarine
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup water
Heat ingredients to simmer (350 degrees) in an electric skillet for seven minutes. Stir after cooking. Cool and package in a freezer container. Makes 8 to 10 servings.
