My SIL Entered My Late Mother’s Pie At The County Fair Under Her Own Name. Then The 86-Year-Old Judge Read The Recipe Card Out Loud

The card was propped against the pie plate in a little plastic stand, the kind they hand out at the entry table so the judges know whose pie is whose.

Class 14. Sour Cream Raisin. Original Family Recipe. Sherry Brandvold.

I stood in the open-air exhibit hall at the Sac County Fair with a lemonade sweating in my hand and read it three times. The fans in the rafters were pushing the hot air around without cooling anything. Somewhere behind me a little boy was crying because his rabbit had only gotten a red ribbon.

The pie under that card had a high meringue with brown tips, pulled up into points with the back of a spoon. The crust was crimped with a fork, not fingers, every third press turned sideways. I knew that crimp. I’d watched it done at a kitchen table on Fourth Street for sixty years.

That was my mother’s pie.

My mother had been dead fourteen months.

Twenty-Three Blue Ribbons in a Coffee Can

My name is Opal Lindahl. I’m sixty-seven years old, and I carried mail on a rural route out of Sac City for thirty-one years, so there aren’t many people in this county I don’t know by their mailbox.

My mother was Mae Brandvold. If you were in this part of Iowa any summer between 1968 and 1991, you might remember her. She was the woman who won the pie class at the county fair twenty-three times out of twenty-four, and the year she didn’t, she had shingles.

She kept the blue ribbons in a Folgers can on top of the refrigerator. Not framed. Not pinned up. Just stuffed in a coffee can like rubber bands.

“Ribbons are for the day,” she used to say. “Pie is for the people.”

She made sour cream raisin for every funeral lunch at Trinity Lutheran for forty years. She made it for the threshing crews when I was a girl and for the snowplow drivers when I was grown. When my husband Lyle had his gallbladder out in 1998, three pies showed up at the hospital nurses’ station with no note, and every nurse on that floor knew exactly who’d sent them.

In 1992 she stopped entering. She said it was time to let somebody else have a turn.

“Somebody” meant Thelma Voss.

Thelma taught home economics at the high school for thirty-five years, and she came in second to my mother eleven times. Eleven. People in town used to joke that the second-place ribbon at the Sac County Fair had Thelma’s name printed on it at the factory.

For years they barely spoke. Then sometime in the eighties, after Thelma’s husband died, my mother started bringing her supper on Tuesdays, and somehow that turned into cards on Tuesdays, and that turned into thirty years of the two of them sitting at Mom’s kitchen table playing five hundred and insulting each other’s canning.

When Mom died, Thelma sat in the second pew at the funeral with her cane across her knees and didn’t cry once. Afterward she came through the line, took both my hands and said, “Your mother was the most stubborn woman I ever knew, and I’d give my good hip to lose to her one more time.”

That was Thelma.

“Mae Told Me I Could Have It”

My brother Arlo is three years younger than me. He farmed with Dad until Dad passed, then sold the ground and went to work for the co-op. He’s a good man in the way a lot of quiet men are good. He shows up. He doesn’t make a fuss.

Arlo married Sherry in 1987. In thirty-eight years I never saw Sherry bake a single thing. She brought a store tray from the bakery in Storm Lake to every holiday and set it down on the counter like she’d done us all a kindness.

That was fine. Not everybody bakes.

The week after Mom’s funeral, we cleaned out the house on Fourth Street. It was August and the window units had been shut off, and we were all sweating through our shirts and snapping at each other the way families do in a dead woman’s kitchen.

I’d gone out to the garage for more boxes. When I came back, the cupboard over the stove was open, and the green tin recipe box with the rooster on the lid was gone.

That box had sat in that cupboard since before I was born. My grandmother started it. My mother filled it. Some of the cards were so stained with lard and vanilla you could see light through them.

Sherry was carrying a laundry basket out to her Buick.

“Sherry,” I said, “did you take Mom’s recipe box?”

She didn’t even slow down. “Mae told me I could have it.”

“When?”

“Oh, a while back. At Easter, I think.” She settled the basket in the trunk. “I’m going to make copies for all the grandkids. Laminate them. It’ll be a nice thing.”

I looked at Arlo. Arlo looked at the gravel.

Lyle put his hand on my back, very lightly, which is his way of saying not here, not today.

So I let it go. You’d be surprised what you let go the week you bury your mother.

The copies never came. I asked at Thanksgiving. I asked at Christmas. Sherry said she was “working on it” and changed the subject to her knee replacement.

By spring I’d stopped asking. I told myself it was just a box of index cards. I knew most of those recipes by heart anyway.

That’s the kind of thing you tell yourself when you don’t want to fight with your brother’s wife.

Sherry’s Heirloom Pies

In May my granddaughter Hazel, who is fourteen and knows everything there is to know about a phone, came over to help me weed the strawberry bed. Halfway down the row she sat back on her heels and held her phone out to me.

“Grandma. Isn’t this Aunt Sherry?”

It was a Facebook page. Sherry’s Heirloom Pies. There was a photo of Sherry in a gingham apron standing behind a folding table at the Saturday farmers market in Storm Lake, with a row of pies in front of her. Sour cream raisin. Rhubarb custard. Gooseberry.

Every single one of them was Mom’s.

Underneath, Sherry had written: “Baked from my own family recipes, perfected over the years in my own kitchen. Made with love, the old-fashioned way!”

Hazel scrolled. There was a pie with a meringue crown, and the caption said, “My signature sour cream raisin. People ask me for the secret all the time. A girl has to keep a few things to herself! 😉”

I sat down in the dirt.

“Grandma? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, honey. Keep scrolling.”

There was a post from June. Sherry had a meeting with a buyer from a grocery chain out of Des Moines that was looking for “authentic Iowa farmhouse pies” for its stores. And then there was the one that made my hands go cold.

“Entering my sour cream raisin at the Sac County Fair this year! If I bring home that blue ribbon, Sherry’s Heirloom Pies is going to the next level. Fingers crossed! 🥧💙”

I called Arlo that night.

“She’s using Mom’s recipes,” I said. “She’s selling them. She’s telling people they’re hers.”

Arlo was quiet for a long time. I could hear the TV on behind him.

“Opal,” he said finally, “they’re just pies.”

“Then she can give me the box back.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

He didn’t. Or if he did, it didn’t take. And I’ll be honest with you, I almost didn’t go to the fair that year. Lyle talked me into it. He said Hazel had a market lamb in the 4-H barn and she’d never forgive either of us if we missed the show.

So that’s how I came to be standing in the exhibit hall on a Thursday afternoon in August, with a lemonade in my hand, reading my sister-in-law’s name on my mother’s pie.

The Card on the Pie Table

Sherry saw me before I could decide what to do. She was by the pie case in a red blouse with a little gingham bow at the collar, talking to two women from her church.

“Opal!” she called, too bright. “Did you see? I entered!”

I walked over. My knees weren’t working quite right.

“That’s Mom’s pie,” I said, quietly. I didn’t want a scene. I’ve never been a scene person.

Sherry’s smile didn’t move, but her eyes did. They went to the church women and back to me.

“It’s a family recipe,” she said. “I’m family. Mae would’ve been thrilled somebody was carrying it on.”

“You put ‘original.'”

“Well, it is original. I’ve changed things.” She laughed and touched the bow at her throat. “Everybody’s sour cream raisin is a little different, Opal. You don’t own raisins.”

One of the church women laughed along. The other one looked at me with something like pity, which was worse.

“Give me back the box, Sherry.”

“We can talk about that later,” she said. “This isn’t really the place.” And she turned back to her friends.

Lyle found me five minutes later sitting on a hay bale behind the poultry barn. He sat down next to me and handed me a corn dog I didn’t want.

“I could go say something,” he said.

“No.”

“I could go say something loud.”

That almost made me laugh. Lyle has not said something loud in seventy-one years. He sold seed corn for four decades on the strength of being the calmest man in any room.

“There’s no point,” I said. “She baked it. The rules say you have to bake it yourself. They don’t say whose recipe it is.”

“Who’s judging?”

I hadn’t even thought to look.

Lyle went and checked the board by the entry table and came back with a funny look on his face.

“You’re going to want to stay for this,” he said.

Thelma Voss Takes Her Seat

The pie judging at our fair is done in public, at three o’clock, at a long table at the front of the exhibit hall. Folding chairs for the crowd. A microphone that whistles if you stand too close. The judge tastes every entry, writes her scores on a clipboard, and then, at the very end, she reads the winning recipe out loud before it gets typed up for next year’s fair booklet.

That last part has been a tradition since 1956. Every entrant in the pie class has to turn in a recipe card with the pie, in their own hand, so it can go in the booklet if they win.

At five minutes to three, a golf cart pulled up to the side door and a young man from the fair board helped Thelma Voss out of it.

She was eighty-six. She had one hand on a four-footed cane and the other on his arm, and she was wearing the same navy dress with white piping she’d worn to my mother’s funeral. Her white hair was pinned up tight. She took her seat at the judging table, set her purse beside her clipboard, and folded her hands.

I hadn’t known she was judging. Nobody had told me, and I guess nobody had told Sherry either, because Sherry wouldn’t have known Thelma Voss from the woman who sold raffle tickets.

Sherry sat in the front row with her phone ready to film.

I sat in the back row with Lyle on one side of me and Hazel, who’d come straight from the sheep barn and smelled like it, on the other.

There were fourteen pies in Class 14. Thelma tasted every one of them. She took her time. She cut a thin wedge from each, looked at the bottom crust, smelled it, took one bite, and set her fork down. She didn’t drink water between them. She’d told me once that water was for amateurs.

When she got to the sour cream raisin, she stopped.

She cut her wedge. She looked at the bottom crust for a long time. She took a bite. Then she did something I’d never seen her do in all the years I’d known her. She took a second bite.

Her face didn’t change. But she set her fork down very carefully, the way you’d set down something that might break.

“Oh, she likes it,” Sherry said to the woman next to her, loud enough to carry.

Thelma went on through the last three pies. She wrote on her clipboard. Then she leaned toward the microphone, which whistled, and the young man from the fair board leaned in and adjusted it for her.

“First place in Class 14,” she said, “goes to the sour cream raisin.”

Sherry shot up out of her chair with both hands in the air. The church women clapped. Somebody whistled. Sherry walked up to the front, accepted her blue ribbon from the young man, and turned around holding it up for her phone.

I didn’t clap. I couldn’t make my hands do it.

Hazel put her head on my shoulder.

“Now,” Thelma said into the microphone, “as is our tradition, I’ll read the champion’s recipe for the booklet.”

She picked up the index card that had come in with the pie.

“One Teaspoon of Cider Vinegar”

Thelma held the card at arm’s length, then put on the reading glasses that hung from a chain around her neck, then held it at arm’s length anyway.

“Sour Cream Raisin Pie,” she read. “Crust. One and a half cups flour. Half a teaspoon salt. Half a cup of lard, cold, not shortening, I mean it.”

A few people chuckled.

“Four to five tablespoons ice water.” Thelma paused. “One teaspoon cider vinegar in the crust.”

She stopped.

The room waited.

She looked at the card over the top of her glasses. Then she read the next line slowly, one word at a time, like she was making sure she had it right.

“Don’t. Tell. Thelma.”

There was a little ripple of laughter in the room, the kind people do when they don’t know what’s funny.

Up front, Sherry laughed too. “Oh, that’s just a family saying,” she said, leaning toward the microphone without being asked. “It’s a joke. It’s been on that card forever.”

“I see,” said Thelma. She set the card down on the table and smoothed it flat with two fingers. “Tell me, Mrs. Brandvold. Who’s Thelma?”

Sherry blinked. “It’s nobody. It’s just something they always said. A saying.”

“A saying,” Thelma repeated.

“Yes.”

“Well,” said Thelma Voss, “I’m Thelma.”

You could have heard a raisin drop.

I watched it happen on Sherry’s face. First she didn’t understand. Then she looked at the name tag on the judge’s table. Then she looked out at the crowd, and found me in the back row, and her face went the color of the meringue.

The Card in Thelma’s Purse

“I came in second to this pie eleven times,” Thelma said. Her voice was steady and dry. The microphone didn’t whistle once. “From 1968 to 1991, a woman named Mae Brandvold beat me at this fair so many times my late husband stopped coming to watch. I would go home and I would bake that pie over and over, trying to work out what she was doing to that crust. Tender. Flaky. Never tough, no matter how hot the summer was. I tried butter. I tried egg. I tried prayer.”

People were laughing now, for real.

“In 1992, Mae quit entering. She said it was my turn. And the day she quit, she came over to my house and gave me this.”

Thelma opened her purse. It took a while. Everyone waited while she dug past a coin purse and a pack of Kleenex and a roll of butterscotch candies. Then she pulled out an index card in a plastic sleeve, yellowed at the edges, and held it up next to the one Sherry had turned in.

“This is Mae’s handwriting,” Thelma said. “Same recipe. Word for word. Cold lard, not shortening, I mean it. One teaspoon cider vinegar in the crust. And right where that card says ‘Don’t tell Thelma,’ mine says, ‘Now you can tell Thelma. Love, Mae.'”

She set the two cards side by side on the table.

“Mrs. Brandvold. I’m going to ask you one question, and I’d like you to think before you answer it. Did you develop this recipe?”

Sherry’s mouth opened. Closed. She looked at the church women. They were very busy looking at their purses.

“I’ve made changes,” she said.

“What changes?”

Sherry couldn’t name one.

“I didn’t think so,” Thelma said, gently, and that gentleness was the worst thing that happened to Sherry all day. “The rules for Class 14 say an entry marked ‘original’ has to be the baker’s own recipe. Otherwise it goes in Heritage, and it gets credited to the person who wrote it. This one was marked original. So I’m afraid I’ll need that ribbon back.”

The young man from the fair board looked like he wanted to crawl under the judging table. He held out his hand.

Sherry stood there holding her blue ribbon in one hand and her phone, still recording, in the other. Then she pushed the ribbon into his palm without looking at him, grabbed her purse off her chair, and walked straight down the center aisle and out the side door into the sun.

She didn’t look at me as she went past. I didn’t need her to.

Thelma tapped the microphone.

“I’m awarding first place to the second-place entry, a very good rhubarb custard from Mrs. Hruska of Lake View,” she said. “And I’m sending a Heritage ribbon home to Mae Brandvold. Mae’s not here to collect it. But I believe her daughter is sitting in the back row.”

Every head in that hall turned around.

I don’t remember standing up. Hazel says I did, and that Lyle had to give me a little push. I remember the walk up the aisle felt about a mile long, and that people were clapping, and that Thelma didn’t stand up when I got to the table because her hip wouldn’t let her. She just held out the white Heritage ribbon and the yellowed card in its plastic sleeve.

“No,” I said. “That’s yours. She gave it to you.”

“She gave me the secret,” said Thelma. “I don’t need the card. I’ve known about the vinegar for thirty-three years, Opal.” She pressed it into my hand anyway. “And I still couldn’t beat her. Do you know why? She never measured it. She just poured a splash in the cap of the bottle. That ‘one teaspoon’ business was for the rest of us.”

I laughed. I hadn’t laughed in weeks, and it came out of me sideways, half a sob.

“She’d hate this,” I said. “All this fuss.”

“She’d love it,” said Thelma. “She’d pretend to hate it, and then she’d go home and put that ribbon in the coffee can.”

A Green Tin Box on My Porch Swing

Arlo came by the house the next morning at six thirty, before it got hot. I heard his pickup in the drive, and by the time I got out to the porch he was already walking back to it.

On the porch swing was the green tin recipe box with the rooster on the lid.

“Arlo,” I said.

He stopped with his hand on the truck door. He’s sixty-four years old and he stood in my driveway looking about nine.

“I should have made her give it back the day she took it,” he said. “Mom never told her she could have it. I knew that. I just didn’t want the fight.”

“I know.”

“She’s taking the Facebook page down. The grocery people called her last night. Somebody sent them a video.” He shook his head. “Half the fair was filming.”

“I didn’t send anything.”

“I know you didn’t.” He looked at the box on the swing. “Count them. I don’t think she was careful with them.”

I opened the lid after he’d gone. Two hundred and some cards, my grandmother’s spidery hand and my mother’s square one. Gooseberry. Rhubarb custard. Pork and sauerkraut for New Year’s. Lefse, which my mother never once made without swearing.

The sour cream raisin card wasn’t in there.

I figured it was gone. I figured Sherry had torn it up out of spite, and I told myself that was all right, because I had Thelma’s card now, and the one in my head.

Four days later there was a white envelope in my mailbox. No stamp. No return address. Just “Opal” on the front, in handwriting I’d seen on every Christmas card for thirty-eight years.

Inside was my mother’s card. A little bent at one corner. No note.

I put it back in the box, right where it belonged, between Rhubarb Custard and Sauerkraut.

I’m not going to tell you Sherry and I are close now. We’re not. She brings the store tray from Storm Lake at Thanksgiving, and I thank her for it, and we talk about her knee. That’s about as far as it goes. But she came, and she sat at my table, and Arlo held her hand under the tablecloth during grace. That’s not nothing.

The Next August

I’ll tell you how it ended, because it ended the way my mother would have wanted, which is to say with a pie contest and a little bit of humiliation.

The next summer, Thelma Voss entered the pie class at the Sac County Fair for the first time since 1991. She was eighty-seven. She baked sour cream raisin.

So did I. So did Hazel, in the junior division, with her grandmother hovering over her shoulder the whole time saying cold lard, not shortening, I mean it.

Hazel took the blue ribbon in juniors. She cried so hard her mascara ran, and then she told everybody in the 4-H barn it was because of the onions at the burger stand.

In the open class, the judge that year was a pastry instructor from the community college in Fort Dodge. Very serious young man. He tasted every pie twice.

He gave first place to Thelma.

He gave second place to me.

Thelma sat there in her navy dress with the white piping, holding her blue ribbon in both hands like it might fly away, and she looked across that hall at me with the biggest grin I’ve ever seen on an eighty-seven-year-old woman.

“Fifty-seven years,” she called across the room. “Fifty-seven years, and I finally beat a Brandvold!”

“You beat a Lindahl,” I called back. “Doesn’t count.”

“Oh, it counts.”

I took my red ribbon home and put it in the Folgers can on top of my refrigerator, right on top of the twenty-three blue ones, and I’m not ashamed to tell you I laughed the whole time.

Hazel has her own recipe box now. I bought her a green tin one at an antique store in Carroll, no rooster on it, but close enough. On Sunday afternoons she comes over and I copy out the cards for her one at a time, by hand, the way my mother would have.

On the bottom of the sour cream raisin card, in my own handwriting, I wrote: Don’t tell Thelma.

Then I drove it over to Thelma’s house and showed her, and she laughed until she had to sit down.

If someone in your family taught you a recipe by heart, go call them tonight and ask them about it. And if this story made you think of a woman whose pie was the best one in the county, share it so her name gets said out loud again.

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