Locals bake cherry pies for cherry festival
Berl Tiskus
Ladies from the Montecahto Club laugh and visit as they make “sweetart” cherry pies. The sweetart filling is a mixture of sweet and sour Flathead cherries. Baked fresh, the pies were a big hit at the Polson Main Street Flathead Cherry Festival last weekend.
Berl Tiskus
Pies ready to be baked go to a staging area by the oven.
Linda Sappington
Montecahto members Marlene Mimms, left, and Myrna Ducharme sell cherry pies at the Polson Main Street Flathead Cherry Festival on July 20.
Linda Sappington
Montecahto members Marlene Mimms, left, and Myrna Ducharme sell cherry pies at the Polson Main Street Flathead Cherry Festival on July 20.
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POLSON — For pie lovers, it was a heavenly sight — an assembly line for cherry pies.
The ladies from the Montecahto Club on Flathead Lake’s east shore were making pies in the basement of the Lake City Bakery on July 17 and 18 so they’d be fresh for the Flathead Cherry Festival on July 20 and 21.
And they were having fun, too, laughing and talking as talented hands pat pie dough and wield rolling pins.
The Montecahto women cooked huge pots of cherry filling in the kitchen at Soup’s On.
“It’s called Sweetart,” Montecahto president Myrna Ducharme explained, since the filling is a mixture of sweet and sour Flathead cherries, sugar and goodness.
Then they each grabbed an apron and a rolling pin, all the supplies they needed for pie making and headed to the Lake City Bakery, where Marilyn and Mike Humphrey graciously allowed them to use the bakery’s massive oven, industrial size mixer and large worktables.
“It is a magnificent facility,” Montecahto member Alice Erb said, adding that the ladies made 85 pies on July 17.
The goal on July 18 was to use the rest of the five-gallon buckets of cherry filling.
Olga Lincoln and Dee Keese were running the mixer, while eight other Montecahto women rolled out balls of dough, filled the pies, smoothed on a top crust, crimped the edges and pricked the top so the steam could escape during baking.
Selling pies at the Flathead Cherry Festival is one of the group’s top moneymakers, after their pasty sale. They use the funds to provide a yearly $1,500 scholarship for a Polson high school senior, sponsor a Girl’s State delegate and send packages to area armed forces veterans.
At meetings, members bring non-perishable food, and the Montecahto Club donates the canned and dry goods to the Loaves and Fish Food Pantry.
The upkeep of the 75-year-old Montecahto clubhouse is expensive, too. The group has raised money through the years to put insulation in and new drywall on the ceiling, replaced the windows, installed a powder room and changed out some of the antiquated wiring in the kitchen.
Now funds will go towards rewiring the upstairs portion of the clubhouse and replacing the carpet downstairs, which was pulled up when the building flooded last year.
After the cherry pies were baked, they were kept fresh in the Veterans of Foreign Wars refrigerators until they were sold last weekend at the Cherry Festival.
