The Pie Safe

Over the years I have inherited a number of pieces of furniture  from various relatives.  Not only are some of these beautiful examples of the craftsmanship of a bygone age but many of them also come with family stories. It seems that my family collected stories about as enthusiastically as they did furniture.  No surprise there.

One such piece was a large,walnut double door piece called a pie safe.  This piece was especially unique because of it's size.  Most pie safes were small cupboards literally used to keep flies off the freshly baked pies while they cooled and before they were eaten. Their main characteristic was the placement of pieces of tin in the doors and on the sides.  These tin pieces were punched with a series of holes in a decorative design to allow air to circulate but keep out insects.  Most pie safes stood about 5 to 5 1/2 feet tall and usually had short legs.  Mine stands about 7 feet tall and has had the legs cut off.  It's a monster pie safe.

As a child it stored toys and I once papered it to use as a doll house. (Mama was not impressed.)  When I married it was one of the pieces that I took to our first house.  Ever since then it has had a place of honor in my kitchen.  In fact when I remodeled my kitchen I took the drawer to the showroom because I wanted my cabinets to go with the pie safe because it had to be in my new kitchen, too.  In short, it's one of my favorite things. 

However, it's story is fun, too.  My mother and father hunted antiques from their earliest days.  They often would find pieces that no one else would look twice at.  My dad swore that Mama once talked an old granny lady out of the chair she was sitting in on her front porch.  They happily dug through old out buildings and barns looking for treasures.  They were hunting antiques when people were getting rid of that "old furniture" by throwing them in sink-holes or hay lofts.  Beauty is certainly in the eye of the beholder. 

On one of their early hunts they found this old cupboard in a dusty outbuilding.  Mama thought it had possibility even though it was covered in layer upon layer of old paint and leaning drastically against the wall.  The lean was quickly corrected by moving it to a solid section of floor.  Out came Mama's pocket knife and she scratched industriously at the paint on one side.  After a little while a glimmer of wood showed through.  With delight, she declared that it was sure to be walnut.  They loaded up their find and took it back to the boarding house.

Mama was cooking for the boarding house where they were living.  That gave her some free time to work on the pie safe.  She set it up on the back porch and started to work removing the layers of old paint.  The process involved lots of foul smelling concoctions and scraping. It wasn't long before she had an interested audience of the residents of the boarding house.  Every night after supper they would gather to offer opinions and advice.  Most of the men thought it hysterically funny that she was laboring on that old piece of junk. They suggested that she was working awfully hard on something that would be better used for firewood. Some suggested that she could put it in the chicken house and use it for the hens to nest. She took all their ribbing and just kept on working.

Then one day one of the forestry service men came out on the porch and settled on an old bucket.  He smoked quietly for a while, then offered a little advice on removing a particularly stubborn patch of paint.  Shortly he was working along with her as they cleaned on the old piece.  Everyday he came and would sand or scrape.  While he worked he talked about his family and where he came from.  He was from Boston and understood and loved old furniture.  Eventually the pie safe was finished and ready to be installed in the kitchen, where it became a beautiful display piece for her collection of dishes.

She often said that she never looked at it that she didn't think of the gentle Yankee who ignored the teasing of his friends to help her bring her pie safe to life.