This year the Fair Association is gathering recipes for a cookbook to be sold at the 70th Anniversary of the Oley Fair in 2016. Recipes are being collected for the following categories: beverages, wines, canned goods, soups, salads, any baked goods, pies, desserts, meats, main dishes, casseroles, vegetables, and side dishes. You are welcome to submit as many recipes as you like.
All recipes must be received no later than October 31, 2015. For more information, go to <http://www.oleyfair.org/2016cookbook.htm>.
Not far from the fairgrounds, an old stone home, rumored to date back to 1810, sits close along a road in Oley. The stone had just been repointed. A mound of mulch in the driveway was ready to be distributed among garden beds. Specs of yellow and red dotted the nearby crabapple trees. What seemed like a quiet rural scene was anything but as Anna Boyer pulled out her recipes and began preparing for competition at the Oley Fair with her baked goods.
“The whole community comes together to work to make that fair successful,” said Boyer. “Whether they’re entering things or working at the stands, helping to clean up, or whatever, everybody works together to make that fair great.”
Boyer had brought out a basket of apples from the smokehouse. A buffet server held jars of sugar, chocolate chips, fine chocolate sprinkles, cashew nuts, and a large bag of flour made by F.M. Brown’s Sons, Inc., Fleetwood.
She opened a tall jar of walnuts and said, “These I’m going to go through because you can see some are whole and I’ll use those on the top of the nut cake. Some of these are like pieces and I’ll use those on the cookies maybe, but I don’t know yet. I have to organize them.”
For the past 25 years, Boyer has earned a trophy for her baked goods. She starts out with biscuits, muffins, cornbread, and that kind of stuff, then almost all the pies, including one-crust, two-crust, and custard pies. She enters most of the candy and cookies and usually seven different kinds of cakes as well as a few other categories except bread. She does bake bread, but said it takes too much time.
Boyer also bought cashew nuts to put on top of her caramels. She is planning a trip to Echo Hill Country Market, Fleetwood, for raw peanuts to fry. She has to pick up fresh berries stored in her sister’s freezer. Her friend, Shirley Moyer, gave her sour cherries picked fresh off the tree for pies at a barbeque for the Veteran’s group in Oley plus some for the fair. Her neighbor gave her the apples she has stored in the smokehouse. Boyer said it’s a matter of making sure you have all of the ingredients you’ll need to make the recipe(s).
Boyer enters the competition with recipes she had collected and used over the years and follows a strategy for preparing the food.
“On Sunday, I will measure out all the dry ingredients for the baking powder biscuits, I always sift every bit of flour, and I put the butter in it. Baking powder biscuits are flour and baking powder, a little sugar and salt, and then you take the butter and you knead it into the flour. I put all that so it’s a nice kneaded bag of biscuit ingredients ready to go. Tuesday, I will take that bag and I will add the cream, mix them up, roll them out, and bake them so that when I take those biscuits to the fair, even though I’ve had the ingredients ready to go, I don’t bake them until Tuesday so that they’re perfectly fresh,” said Boyer.
On Sunday she will bake two banana layers, two chocolate layers, two coconut layers, two spice layers, two yellow layers, and two nut layers. She will wrap them up when they are just a little bit warm so they don’t dry out and then refrigerate them until Tuesday when she will ice them and decorate with banana chips, coconut, etc. She has already chocolate-coated the pretzels and marshmallows she’ll be using in other recipes. This is just a small part of Boyer’s process in preparing for the fair.
“These recipes are almost like family heirlooms,” said Boyer. “I absolutely love to bake. I’m 70 years old so I’ve been baking a long time. Even when I was a little girl, my mother and father would let me do all kinds of stuff that I couldn’t believe people would let me do in the kitchen. I could remember making French fries, oh they were there, and I was only about 10. They were just very open to me cooking and they always enjoyed eating it. My sister and I had wonderful parents.”
Boyer said many of her recipes came from people she knew and some of her favorite cookbooks. Her chocolate cake recipe came from the nurse at the school where she worked and her cornbread came from the bi-lingual teacher. She is happy to share her recipes with anyone who is interested and will be submitting recipes for the 2016 Oley Fair Cookbook.
The Fair runs Sept. 17 and 18, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Sept. 19, 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. There is free admission and a $5 parking fee. Goodtime Amusements will be offering a ride for one price on September 17, 1 to 5, and on September 18, 11 to 3. The cost is $18.
According to the Fair’s website, the Oley Valley Community Fair promotes good friendly competition among the many friends and neighbors in the surrounding Oley area. Each year you can see a wide variety of local products from the farm and home that are entered in many different categories.
