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All photos by Emily Giancarlo
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By day, Stephanie Jeter is a physical therapist at Baptist Health, where she works in acute care, helping patients with a wide range of illnesses and disabilities. The Lexington transplant is better known in some local circles, however, for other talents: for her role in Lexington's old-time music scene, where she leads a weekly old-time music jam session at the North Limestone coffee shop Broomwagon, and for her incredibly beautiful and delicious homemade pies.
“I always call making pies my PT – my pie therapy,” she said, nodding to an acronym commonly associated with her profession as a physical therapist. “It’s a way to process something else going on in my life while doing something productive, to have quiet time to myself in the kitchen.”
Though she’s originally from the heart of Appalachia – a small town in east Tennessee called Elizabethton – Jeter’s impetus to pursue these two very Appalachian-influenced hobbies came from an unlikely place: a New York City apartment building called the International House, where she lived for a spell in the mid-aughts while her husband at the time was in graduate school.
A Rockefeller initiative geared to promote international relationships, the International House provides affordable housing for scholars and young professionals from around the world. While living there, Jeter made friends from everywhere and helped organize an annual event showcasing the traditional dress, music and dance from the various home countries of the local residents.
Being enmeshed in such a diverse community and exposed to so many different cultural traditions got the young Appalachian native thinking about her own cultural identity.
“I had so many friends from around the world who did things specific to their culture, and while I was up there, I started [thinking], ‘I don’t do anything from the culture where I’m from,’” Jeter recalled. “The Appalachian region is so culturally rich, and I don’t do anything from that region that I can say ‘this is from that area.’”
That’s not to say she didn’t have any hobbies or artistic talents – a classically trained musician, Jeter was steeped in French horn, piano and orchestra experience. The more she reflected on these musical outlets in the context of her personal cultural heritage, however, the more of a disconnect she started to feel with the classical music she had been playing for so many years.
“After I moved out of New York City back to Tennessee, I really wanted to embrace my musical heritage and the musical heritage of Appalachia,” she said.
Jeter started not only listening to more country music and bluegrass music but shifting her own musical style in that direction as well. Following old-time music’s aural tradition of learning by ear, she started showing up at jam sessions in and around her hometown to see what she could pick up, dabbling in guitar and autoharp before eventually picking up the stand-up bass. The musician – who currently performs with the Tennessee-based band Empty Bottle String Band, in addition to picking up regular gigs with other local acts – found herself enamored by the way the music seemed to bring people of different ages and backgrounds together.
“I was discovering this music that just felt so real,” she said. “It came from a deep place, something that had been a part of people’s lives for hundreds of years.”
It was that same search for a deeper cultural connection to her Appalachian roots that led Jeter to another interest that would soon come to play a large role in her life: baking pies.
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“Around that time where I started to play this music that felt very real to me, I wanted to find other areas of my life to just be more authentic,” she explained. “The next place I turned to was food.”
At that point in her life – her mid-20s – Jeter wasn’t exactly cooking much of what she calls “real food.”
“Everything I made was from a box – instant food, just-add-water type of meals,” she said. “I wanted to make something from scratch, start to finish, and I said, ‘why not apple pie?’”
Turning to online recipe forums, Jeter started collecting research for her first homemade pie. She found herself focusing as much on the comments in the forums mentioning substitutions and alternative methods as much as she was on the original recipes themselves.
“I did a lot of research before I made my first apple pie – I was in school at the time, so I guess I was in research mode,” she said with a laugh. “I tried to gather my resources to get the best recipe I could find.”
Surprising to both her family and her, Jeter’s first pie was a hit.
“I let my mom have some, and she was like ‘I can’t believe you made this,’” Jeter recalled with a laugh. “I had never made anything before.”
While Jeter soon found herself regularly fielding requests to bring her pies to family holiday parties and other functions, when she moved to Lexington in 2012, her pie repertoire consisted primarily of that one apple pie recipe, though she had recently begun experimenting with a black raspberry pie after picking raspberries from a friend’s farm. When she saw a flyer that summer advertising Lexington’s Great American Pie contest, hosted by the city each summer in affiliation with the Fourth of July festival, the amateur baker decided to go out on a limb and enter both of her pies.
The contest results that year served to validate Jeter’s growing interest in baking: Her black raspberry pie won first place in the “made from scratch” category, with her apple pie taking second in the “semi-homemade” division.
“It was kind of this eye opener for me,” Jeter said. “I never thought [the pies] were award winning by any means, but it was just enough encouragement for me to want to keep trying and to get better.”
Fast forward to today, Jeter has expanded her recipe repertoire – and her collection of ribbons – exponentially. Her pies have earned awards in Lexington’s Great American Pie Contest every year since 2013, including first place in the competition’s “homemade” division the past two years; her “Tipsy Caramel Chocolate Pie with Pecans” also placed third in the “chocolate cream” division of the American Pie Council’s National Pie Competition last year.
More than a hobby or pastime, Jeter views making pies as a craft – she’s constantly experimenting with new techniques, ingredients and other special touches, and always looks for ways to make each pie look different and unique. While the contests and ribbons encourage her to continue improving her recipes, her greatest interest and motivation for baking is the same as it is with music: that special capacity it has to bring people together.
Local musicians gather in the courtyard of Broomwagon Bikes & Coffee on a recent Monday night for the Old Time Music Jam that Jeter leads each Monday night. (The jam moves indoors during cold or otherwise inclement weather.) Photo by Emily Giancarlo.
“In my process of striving to get better, I had all these pies [and] I had to keep giving them to people or bringing them to events because I wanted them to get eaten,” she explained. “I kept getting more encouraged in thinking just how much those few moments that you spend with someone while you’re eating some food together can bring people closer together.”
“It’s those moments in between the contests that I really love the most,” she added.
Click here for Stephanie's Brown-Butter Apple Pie Recipe!
Each Monday night (holidays excepted), you can find Stephanie Jeter and a rotating cast of other local musicians at Broomwagon Coffee & Bikes, where she leads a casual old-time music jam session started by musician Brett Ratliff a couple years ago. The sessions are open to musicians of all skill levels; oftentimes, one or more of Jeter’s pies will also be in attendance.
Follow Stephanie Jeter (and her beautiful pies!) on Instagram at @honeyshinepies or online at www.stephaniejeter.net.
You can also catch her at the following places:
- Old-Time Music Jam. Every Monday at 6:30 p.m. / Broomwagon Coffee & Bikes, 800 N. Limestone St.
- Dumplin’s & Dancin’ at Hindman Settlement School. (Hindman, Kentucky) Jeter will lead a pie-making workshop on Dec. 1 in conjunction with the organization’s “Dumplin’s and Dancin’” event. More info at www.Hindmansettlementschool.org (click the “Upcoming Events” tab).
- Performing live at Red Barn Radio. Wed., Feb. 13 at 8 p.m. / ArtsPlace, 161 N. Mill St.