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Keeping a Tasty Tradition Alive
November/December 2017
By Bobbie Bagel

The baked golden crust cooling on a marble pastry board.

SOHO Board member David Goldberg, stirring the pot!

The fInal product. Looks good enough to eat!

Even though Marston's Department Store has been gone for well over 50 years, many nostalgic reminders of its legacy live on in the memories of wistful San Diegans. One such reminder is the delicious coconut cream pie served in Marston's Tea Room, the lovely restaurant on the sixth floor of the downtown store. At about 45 cents per slice, the pie was a real favorite with the 1950's era Tea Room customers.

The Marston House Museum planning committee, as you may know, is organizing a new exhibit for 2018 to honor the 140th anniversary of the store's opening. We invited San Diego Home/Garden Lifestyles magazine to feature our project. This was part of the museum's outreach effort to jog people's memories about the Marstons or the store and perhaps to encourage them to offer merchandise and ephemera from their closets and scrapbooks. Among many topics, the magazine editor was interested in printing the coveted pie recipe and asked if we could bake one!

Fortunately, some SOHO members and old Friends of the Marston House had revived the baking tradition more than a decade ago. Pat Kelly, the former manager of the Tea Room and an original member of the Friends group, inspired them. Kelly shared many stories about what went on at the popular Tea Room and provided valuable tips on how to prepare some of its favorite dishes.

She recalled specifically that a young kitchen helper's primary responsibility was to peel, cut, slice, and dice the coconuts for the coconut cream pies. "Our secret was to bake the crust, let it cool to room temperature, and then fill the crust as we served it," Kelly told them.

Keeping Kelly's advice in mind, long-time SOHO members Kimberly McKean (a fine baker in her own right), David Goldberg and I got together in Kimberly's kitchen to bake the sample pie we would take to the magazine photo shoot the next day. Kimberly made the piecrust and filling, then David studiously stirred the pot while the filling cooked.

My job was to assemble the pie: crust, filling, and topping, just before the magazine photographer arrived at the Marston House the following day. All turned out well. We expect that hungry readers, curious bakers, and Marston's fans can find the recipe and photos in the February, 2018 issue of San Diego Home/Garden Lifestyles.

When reporting on the baking project at the Marston House Committee meeting, Shel Savage, a young docent and SOHO staff member, said she loves to bake and her husband is a pastry chef. She gladly volunteered to make the pies in the future. So the tradition continues. I can't help but think that would make Pat Kelly smile.

Recipe

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