St. Andrew’s Catholic Church will hold its 50th Anniversary Cranfest Pancake Breakfast during this year’s Warrens Cranberry Festival, Sept. 27-29. The all-you-can-eat pancake and sausage breakfast – featuring the church ladies’ highly guarded cranberry syrup recipe – is served all three days of the festival.
In late August, four members of Queen of the Apostles Parish – Linda Lambert, Sue Weiner, Heidi Ueeck and Loraine Schaller – spent a Saturday morning in the church kitchen making 35 quarts of cranberry syrup for this year’s pancake breakfast.
For several years, Loraine Schaller oversaw cooking the cranberry syrup with help from other church women. But Schaller announced she was stepping back and turned that task over to fellow parishioner Linda Lambert this year.
Schaller and her husband, Jerry, have the distinction of having helped with every church pancake breakfast held since the first one in 1974. “I can’t think of anyone else who is still left who has worked at all 50 of them,” Schaller said.
Lambert was recruited for her note-taking skills to record all the steps involved in making the secret syrup recipe. “I’m trying to make sure I’m writing down what we’re doing, but it keeps changing,” she said, laughing.
The current cranberry syrup recipe was developed by Sue Weiner in 2007. The original recipe served at the breakfast was made with cranberry cocktail juice, but now the church women are using cranberries donated by parishioners Jim and Nodji Van Wychen, owners of Wetherby Cranberry Company.
The first Warrens Cranberry Festival was held in 1973. After the inaugural event, festival organizers asked St. Andrew’s Church members if they would offer breakfast the following year for vendors and others, starting the 50-year tradition.
“And now we have the second and third generation of vendors coming to the breakfast like their parents and grandparents used to do,” said Weiner.
The record number of people served at the church’s pancake breakfast stands at 1,260. Typically about 1,000 festgoers enjoy breakfast served in the church hall, although the number since COVID has been around 700 people. The past few years attendance has started climbing again with the addition of outdoor seating in a tent on the church lawn.
“When the breakfast was started, there weren’t many options for people to eat while they were at Cranfest. But now there are 100 food vendors on the grounds,” said Heidi Ueeck.
Ueeck started helping at the pancake breakfast when she was 19. Now 44, Ueeck said she has only missed helping four times in the past 25 years due to college or work responsibilities.
It takes a small army of volunteers to get ready for the annual pancake breakfast. There is a 10-member committee who oversees the planning, while other parishioners help by cleaning the church before and after the event, picking up supplies and other tasks. A crew of a dozen or so work at each shift during the breakfast to cook the pancakes and sausages, serve food, clear tables and sell tickets.
“It has really helped since St. Andrew’s and St. Mary’s Church in Tomah merged (in 2015) to form Queen of the Apostles Parish. The people in Warrens are stretched so thin with other responsibilities during Cranfest that it really helps that members from Tomah are helping with the breakfast,” Weiner said.
Proceeds from the pancake breakfast have been used to remodel the church kitchen, install new carpeting in the dining room, to purchase altar linens and server albs, and other needed items for the church.
Funds are also used to support the parish’s various mission projects, including donations to Project Milk, a Diocese of La Crosse initiative that supplies powdered milk to thousands of undernourished children in Peru.
Parish members will be serving the pancake-and-sausage breakfast with choice of cranberry or organic maple syrup from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. all three days of the festival. The menu also includes cranberry sauce, coffee, milk and, of course, cranberry juice. The cost is $8 for adults and $5 for children ages 6 to 12.
Along with inviting festgoers to come to the pancake breakfast, parishioners also welcome visitors to attend Mass at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 28. St. Andrew’s Church is located at the corner of Pine and May Streets.