Pennsylvania health authorities are busy fighting a massive threat to public health: Lenten fish-fry dinners:
On the first Friday of Lent, an elderly female parishioner of St. Cecilia Catholic Church began unwrapping pies at the church. That’s when the trouble started.
A state inspector, there for an annual checkup on the church’s kitchen, spied the desserts. After it was determined that the pies were home-baked, the inspector decreed they couldn’t be sold.
“Everyone was devastated,” says Josie Reed, a 69-year-old former teacher known for her pumpkin and berry pies.
Sold for $1 a slice, homemade pies have always been part of the Lenten fish-fry dinners at St. Cecilia’s, located in this tiny city near Pittsburgh. Similar dinners are held in church basements and other venues across the country this time of year.
Look at them! Bloody Catholics filling the bloody world up with bloody pies they can’t bloody sell! Clearly these marauders are going to kill us all if it weren’t for the fine people at the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
This is apparently what caused the recent bills that are meant to exempt non-profits from these insane requirements.
You may think this is silly, but we have to do something about the ‘restaurant loophole’ that allows millions of people a day to go about preparing food in unlicensed kitchens.
[Mary] Pratte, 88, has been attending St. Cecilia’s since she was a girl. She missed a step and spent two and a half weeks in the hospital earlier this year. She said it would be “kind of hard” to get to the church to do any baking. “I’d rather just make them at home,” she says of her coconut-cream pies.
I think I’m going to make a coconut cream pie this weekend in honor of Mary Pratte. If this happened in this area, I’d call up the church and offer them a $50 donation for one of Mary Pratte’s coconut cream pies. (If you read the article, apparently her pie being banned from the event cause quite an uproar. They must be good.)
I also find it interesting that the agency is shielding the agent who hates church lady pies from public scrutiny by refusing the press the opportunity to get any comment.
You know, I think when these idiotic things happen, everyone needs to take a cue from the civil rights movement and practice a little civil disobedience. Tell the health inspector to shove it, and sell the pies anyway. Get as many people as you can to help sell the pies; the more the merrier, and the harder it is for the authorities to enforce their petty regulations without coming across as completely over-the-top.
Living in the Mansfield area of TIoga County, PA I can say that the tradition of meals at churches is not just a lenten thing. You can eat out any Friday and most Saturdays at one denomenation or another. (And breakfast at the firehouse most Saturdays.) Dinner is made at the church kitchen but deserts usually made at home. Most, if not all, of the church dinners have the desert table separate from the serving table.
Perhaps you can get around the whole thing by saying you charge for the dinner, but the pies, cakes, cookies, etc. are free for the asking. That seems to be the rule around here.
Yeah, they’re not selling pies. They are taking donations and for your donation, you get your choice of a free slice of pie.
I would have stuck a toothpick in each slice, sold the toothpick for a $1 donation (stuck in its new “holder” of course) and told the inspector to shove off.
On the other hand, those burritos sold out of the truck where I used to work, licensed though they may have been, caused more than one lost afternoon in the john.