A Willow Grove caterer let high school students
take over his kitchen for their annual pie drive.
November 25, 2002 - The Philadelphia Inquirer, Connie Langland
Even before she rolled out her first pie crust yesterday afternoon, Whitney Wildrick, an 11th grader at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia, had a dusting of flour across a cheek.
"Before you start making pies, you have to get some flour on your hands and your face. You just have to," Whitney said, bearing down on the dough with an oversize wooden rolling pin.
By the time the last pie came out of the oven, she and nine other Germantown Friends students had baked at least 50 apple and pumpkin pies from scratch to donate to the school's annual pie drive.
And they had learned lessons about apple varieties and pie baking, about how to hold a knife, and about the meaning of community service.
The endeavor was the idea of Jon Weinrott, who with his wife owns Peachtree & Ward catering in Willow Grove.
Each November, students from Germantown Friends solicit hundreds of pies from family, friends and businesses to donate to shelters and groups that put together holiday food baskets for needy families.
A year ago, when a student approached Weinrott, the caterer made a counter proposal: He would donate the ingredients, but the students had to do the work, with his supervision, in his commercial kitchen.
"We get a lot of requests for donations - three to five a week," Weinrott said. "You have to pick and choose the ones that are interesting to you."
And he thought there would be extra value for the students if they baked the pies themselves.
Kasey Kaufman, an 11th grader who has participated in the baking both years, first gave credit to every single donation - the school last year gathered 350 pies, she said - but gave a special nod to Weinrott's participation.
"He grasped the idea behind the pie drive," Kaufman said. "Other companies appreciate what we're doing, but they are content to keep a more distant approach. Mr. Weinrott really got involved with us."
Yesterday, Weinrott and Tom Heil, a chef at the firm, treated the students as though they were apprentices for the afternoon.
Weinrott enthused about apple varieties - the students had picked several bushels of two unusual types, mutsus and macouns, at a local orchard a week earlier. Heil took under his wing Nathan Geller, an abject pie-baking beginner, to transform pumpkin puree into an aromatic wonder with bits of crystallized ginger and other spices.
Weinrott counseled the students on what it takes to run a business and impressed them with the likely retail price of the pies they were baking - about $22 each.
And he urged the students to visualize how the pies would be savored later this week.
"Sure, this is a community service project, but think about who is eating the pie... children, their parents, you never know. Just be conscious of the fact that you're making this for someone else," he counseled.
Last year, students baked 20 pies with Weinrott.
This year, an expanded team of student bakers vowed to double that effort - and they did.
The final tally: 29 heady pumpkin and 22 golden-crusted apple pies.
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