Grandpa Myhr’s Walnut Pie Crust
My grandparents both hailed from small town Minnesota. Farmland near Alexandria to be precise. My grandmother, one of many children, made the move to Minneapolis in her late teens and worked as a seamstress. Which was a big move for a young lady at the time. My grandfather, while also from the same area, traveled to the Pacific Northwest and Northern California in his younger days working and training at large hotels as a baker. They both serendipitously traveled back to their hometowns around the same time and the rest, they say, is history.
My grandfather eventually opened his own bakery, Myhr’s Bake Shop, in Minneapolis at 50th & Bryant near Lake Harriet. Though my memories of the bakery are few, since I was fairly young when they retired, I distinctly recall frosted cookies depicting Cookie Monster and marveling at the automatic bread slicer.
I cannot tell you how amazing it was growing up with a baking grandfather: chocolate chip cookies, fresh baked bread and dinner rolls, lefse, flat bread, kransekake, lemon bars….you get the idea. I was given his “little black book” of recipes he used at home. Some of them were from magazine clippings or *gasp* from the back of a bag of chocolate chips. But this gem, I use every year as a base for the pumpkin pie recipe that is also in the “little black book” which is always a hit and I always make at least two…for my family of six. Now, there are some strange measurements (who uses 3/8 of a teaspoon of anything?) and I can only assume he might have converted from dry weights to measurements which is something he did for his home recipes.
This recipe can easily be halved.
Walnut Pie Crust
Ingredients:
- 3/4 cup butter (softened)
- 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
- 2-1/8 whole wheat flour
- 3/4 cup ground walnuts (recipe doesn’t call for toasted but I bet that would be good)
- 3/8 teaspoon salt
- 3/8 teaspoon baking soda
- 3/4 teaspoon vanilla
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 325°.
- Rub all ingredients together until crumbly.
- Distribute evenly into two different pie tins (I like to use Pyrex glass pie plates)
- Press into pan being sure to rim up sides.
- Bake in a preheated oven, about 10-12 minutes, until slightly brown.
- Let cool for a little while then fill with your pie filling and bake according to the recipe’s direction.
Thank you for posting your grandmother’s recipe. I was talking to my father this morning and we were reminiscing about going to Myhr’s Bakery every weekend for doughnuts, long johns, and sweet rolls, but especially the blueberry cream cheese figure-8 danishes. They were our favorite. I would bike over a mile every weekend to pick up a box of them for breakfast, or stop by after getting off the Bryant Avenue bus on the way home from the University. No one else ever made rolls as good as that in my opinion.
We did a little google search to see if anyone had ever posted anything about Myhr’s and there was your grandmother’s walnut pie crust! I am going to try it. You don’t have any of their sweet roll recipes by any chance, do you?
And thank you for posting the pictures. They really brought back memories of the old neighborhood.
Since I am a ‘Myhr’ and grew up in Bloomington….I do remember that Bakery!…We would drive by it occasionally and I always asked my Dad is he was related to them, but he always said no! When I started doing genie I talked to a Lawrence Myhr and he stated they were relatives of his that had that bakery….but I didn’t write down the name of
the folks that owned it!. In the article above it refers to Grandpa but never mentioned a name….I would really like to know who owned it and how they fit into the family tree!.
Sincerely,
Patricia Lovise Johnson (Myhr)
Hello! That’s so neat to hear of your story. I am going to bet my money that Lawrence was “Larry”, my grandfather’s brother. My grandfather’s name was Clifton Myhr who owned the bakery with my grandmother, Irene. I also grew up in Bloomington! There were Myhr’s who lived in East Bloomington as I recall. But Myhr was never a last name I encountered unless we were related haha! If you don’t mind, I’m happy to email you my email address (since I’m not keen on posting it on-line) if you would like to have further discussions. I believe I have some general genealogy that goes back to Trondheim, Norway. But my grandfather and that side of the Myhr’s came from just outside of Alexandria. Here is info on him:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/40494156/clifton-alexander-myhr
-Sara