There's a pie at Shaker Village made from whole lemons, peel and all, and Jack gave it a 4 before he had finished chewing. Nora finished his slice for him. That was Tuesday night in a quiet dining room in central Kentucky, near the end of a fall break trip that came to $442 for two days.
Fall break this year was October 5 through 9. We left Tuesday the 6th at 6:45 a.m., up I-65 past Nashville and Bowling Green to Elizabethtown, then east on the Bluegrass Parkway, about 250 miles. Central Kentucky runs on Eastern time, so we lost an hour and pulled into Lexington around noon, hungry, with Nora in the back seat already holding the phone.
Burgoo and horse farms
Lunch was burgoo at a lunch counter downtown. Burgoo is Kentucky's big-pot stew, the kind churches and county gatherings used to cook outdoors in iron kettles for hundreds of people, with whatever meat came in. Ours had pork, beef and chicken, with lima beans, corn, tomatoes, potatoes and okra, thick enough to stand a spoon in. Here's the why: the long simmer breaks tough meat down into shreds, and the potato starch and the okra thicken the broth, so you get a thick stew with no flour at all. It's peppery more than spicy. Under our one-bite rule, everybody tries one bite of the local thing, and Nora's one bite turned into half a bowl, which I have never seen happen with anything that has black pepper in it. Jack gave it a 7. Lunch for four was $41.
After lunch we drove out Old Frankfort Pike and the back roads around it, past one horse farm after another: black plank fences, old dry-stone walls, barns nicer than our house and thoroughbreds standing in the grass like they knew they were being photographed. By October the spring foals have been weaned, so the young horses were out in little groups, running for no reason at all. We stayed in the car or pulled well off the road. These are working farms, not parks, and you don't feed or call to the horses. Nora filled half the phone anyway.
A night in the Shaker village
Late in the afternoon we drove about 25 miles southwest to Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, near Harrodsburg. The Shakers lived and farmed here for about a hundred years, starting in 1805, and their village is still standing: plain brick and stone buildings among wide fields, with nothing fussy anywhere. Jack counted peg rails, the strips of wooden pegs running along the walls where the Shakers hung chairs, coats and anything else they wanted up off the floor. Nora found the twin spiral staircases in one of the old buildings and lay flat on the floor to photograph them from below.
Our room at the inn in the village was simple: plain wooden furniture, a peg rail of our own and the kind of quiet we don't get at home. Dinner in the dining room was the splurge, $112 with the tip: fried chicken, vegetables, cornbread and two slices of Shaker lemon pie for the table. That pie is the most Shaker thing I can think of. They wasted nothing, so they sliced lemons paper-thin, peel and all, and left them overnight in sugar. The sugar pulls the juice out of the fruit and softens the peel until it's almost marmalade. Then it's stirred together with eggs and baked between two crusts. It's sweet, sour and a little bitter, and I loved it. Jack, as you know, did not.
Wednesday morning there was fog lying on the fields when I walked out early, and the whole village was quiet except for the farm animals. We bought pastries and coffee for $19, walked the grounds one more time and left before lunch. Lunch was pimento cheese sandwiches from the cooler at a picnic table near Elizabethtown, and we were home by 4:00. Church homecoming is Sunday, and there's a stack cake in my near future that takes two days. That's another post.
What it cost
- Gas: $71 (about 525 miles for the whole loop, roughly 23.9 gallons at $2.99)
- Lodging: $142 (one night at the inn in the village, tax included)
- Food: $181 (road snacks $9, burgoo lunch $41, dinner at the inn $112, Wednesday pastries and coffee $19)
- Admissions: $48 (Shaker Village grounds for four; the horse farm roads are free)
- Parking: $0
- Total: $442
- Food per person: $45.25
