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Josephine’s Café

THERE IS A MCDONALD’S just 4 miles from Willow Mills in North Manchester. Across the street is Hardees. They serve hamburgers. So does Josephine’s Café. They serve chicken sandwiches and chicken nuggets. So does Josephine’s Café. They serve French Fries. So does Josephine’s.

So why is it that the high school kids flock to Josephine’s after school, the farmers come in to lunch at Josephine’s, and the locals all gather for coffee at Josephine’s? There are two equally good answers: pork tenderloin and Devlin Pies.

Either one would make the little café a hit, but put together they are pretty much unbeatable. Until McDonald’s starts serving pork tenderloins, there will always be a Josephine’s

Josephine’s serves pork tenderloin sandwiches breaded and deep fried the traditional way. But they also serve them grilled, barbecued, Cajun, and teriyaki. And in Indiana, there is always a preference for a good pork tenderloin sandwich.

As to Devlin Pies, they are the kind that are so thick in the center they look like a basketball was baked inside. Fresh daily, delicious, fruity and served at something less than thermonuclear temperature.

The Story of Devlin Pies

DOTTIE DEVLIN had nothing and it was mortgaged. She inherited the Devlin Estate when her mother died and discovered when she arrived in Willow Mills that the little farm she’d grown up on had grown much smaller over the years. After her dad died, her mother sold off the acreage in order to survive, but still what remained (the house and about 10 acres of apple orchard) was mortgaged to the hilt. It looked almost as though her mother had timed her death to coincide with spending the last penny she could possibly squeeze out of the place.

That apple orchard had been the scene of many adventures when Dottie was growing up. She’d built forts, climbed trees, eaten apples till her belly ached, and been kissed, all under the limbs that stretched out to each other from tree to tree.

Orchard was kind of a generous term for this little grove of very old gnarled trees. But around here legend is a powerful thing, and legend said that Johnny Appleseed had planted this particular stand of apple trees not long before he died in 1845. If that were true, these trees were over a hundred years old, and frankly they didn’t all look that old, though one tree back in the southwest corner of the orchard lorded it over the others like a venerable ancestor. Johnny Appleseed was known to plant trees in neat even rows, but these trees were randomly scattered across the ten acres, though you could see a hint of rows if you squinted just right.

Dottie had grown up calling the apples Pippins and wasn’t sure if that was the actual variety name or not. They came ripe late in August and continued to bear and ripen through September. The apples were good keepers but were small and didn’t seem to have that much flesh on the core. But they had the kind of tart crispness that makes a good baker.

Dottie’s family had acquired the farm in the ’30s when her father moved to Indiana from Ireland. Her mother had always canned apples, made apple pie, apple sauce, and there was usually a jug of apple cider hardening in the cellar. When Dottie got to the house after the funeral, she rummaged around and was glad to find there was still a jug of cider down there. She was just going to sample the brew, but it tasted so good that the sample turned into a tall glass that she sipped as she sat and rocked in her mother’s porch swing, looking out over the orchard and thinking about the past and what she would do. She found herself humming a tune as she poured her second glass. She wasn’t sure at once what the tune was, but she remembered it from her childhood. It had been a favorite when she was a child, but what were the words? After her third glass of the hard cider, the words started flowing out of her mouth and she realized it was the Johnny Appleseed grace that was often sung before dinner around the family table.

“Oh the Lord’s been good to me, And so I thank the Lord, For giving me the things I need: The sun and the rain and the appleseed. The Lord’s been good to me.”

Her spirits lightened as she sang the simple tune over and over, well into the fifth and sixth glasses of cider pressed from that orchard. She wondered vaguely what year it had been made. It was a mild night and Dottie found herself dozing in the porch swing with her knees tucked under her chin as she did when she was a child. When she woke, she took another swig of the cider, tipping back the jug as she seemed to have lost her glass someplace.

Somewhere along the line, she must have fallen deeply into a sleep riddled with dreams of her childhood, her mother and her father, all played out against the backdrop of that old orchard. The next thing she knew, the sun was shining in her eyes having just gotten over the tops of the trees in the east.

And that was when Dottie had a vision. A great white beast looking as if it had stepped out of the pages of The Revelations burst through the hedge row surrounding the orchard. It planted itself against the ancestor tree in the corner and bellowed as it shook the tree, apples dropping around it. It seemed to be telling Dottie that this was her legacy. This was her future. “Follow me,” it said, “and I will take care of you.” And then, bursting through the hole in the hedgerow came a host of people. The magnificent white beast bellowed again and ran past Dottie on the front porch, out toward the road. Dottie got up and joined the shouting mob chasing after the animal into town.

When the excitement died down, Dottie sat nursing a hangover and drinking coffee at Josephine’s cafe. It was nine o’clock in the morning and people were coming in off the streets talking loudly and laughing about the morning’s events. Dottie noticed that most everyone who came in ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. The pies were being cut out of tin pans that were pulled out of a pie cooler, obviously brought in from some bakery a long way away. And finally, the message of the white beast became clear to her. She would bake pies.

She consolidated what assets she had and moved into her mother’s house. She ordered a new stove and oven from the Sears catalog center and when they were delivered, she began her experiments. Her own apples were not ready yet, but she bought apples from the IGA store and began baking pies. For the first three months she was in town, it seemed she lived on apple pie and coffee.

At last she had perfected her recipe. She took a pie into Josephine’s Cafe one morning and asked Jo if she would be interested in sampling a real home-cooked apple pie. Well, Josephine served a slice to the next six customers who came in for pie and coffee. There was quite a stir. Rave reviews, you might say. Dottie walked out that morning with an order for four pies a day.

She spent her days picking and storing the apples from the orchard. She went to bed early and got up at four to start baking pies. At six o’clock she delivered them hot and steaming to Josephine’s. By ten o’clock, they were gone.

Josephine started asking Dottie for more variety of pies. Well, I shouldn’t say asking. Dottie came in one morning and Jo just said, “I’ll take the four apple tomorrow and I’d like two cherry and a blueberry if you don’t mind.” Dottie never even thought to tell her no. She just went down to the IGA and got cherries and blueberries and made up the pies for the next morning.

Well, most of the apples for Devlin Pies still come from the old orchard. Dottie’s getting up there in years now, but she’s got good help and there is no sign that there will be any shortage of Devlin Pies in the near future.

You can still hear her humming a tune when she’s in the kitchen. And whenever anyone asks Dottie how she got started baking pies, she’s likely to say, “Well, it all started with Albert Bailey’s prize bull…”

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