The best part of midsummer isn’t the beach or ribs on the grill. It is mid-July which marks the beginning of the harvest with stone fruits.

In my native Michigan, I looked forward to the first harvest fruit, the sour cherry. As a child, I pitted cherries with a device that screwed onto a Mason jar. It’s most important part was a metal rod that plunged through the fruit, forcing the stone between two curved pieces of flexible blue steel and into the jar. That little machine was the one thing I wanted after my mother’s death. The rest of the family had vague memories of the pitter but no one knew where it was or what happened to it.

I came to New England in 1976, but, despite living at the same latitude, I found no tart cherries. While picking over maroon sweet cherries in a supermarket, I asked the elderly woman sorting next to me why there were no sour cherries in Massachusetts. “Because there is no such thing. A sour cherry is just a cherry that isn’t ripe,” she answered.

What happened to the Kentish red cherries the first Europeans brought with them from England? Did they perish from the cold or neglect? It took more than 20 years before I found pie cherries, which, fortunately are now grown in the Valley.

I missed their short season this summer but launched my personal pie festival with an outsized peach pie meant for a potluck supper. While we’re used to round pies, a pie can be made in the same 9×13 pan used for picnic cakes. Use three cups or 15 ounces of flour, then form the pastry into a rectangle before chilling and the pie will feed a crowd.

Although I served as scullery maid in my mother’s kitchen, she never taught me how to cook. I learned on my own, from cookbooks, in the dark days before the internet. In kitchens without counters, I desperately wanted to make pies. I could not roll pastry on the rigged drain boards meant to hold dish racks, so my first pies had pat-in-the-pan crusts, akin to shortbread.

When I finally had a real kitchen, I developed a fondness for Julia Child’s pate sablee, a rich pastry made with an egg as liquid. Why I abandoned it I don’t know, but it may have had something to do with owning a food processor for a few years.

During the 1970s, when I was following several food gurus, cooks were abandoning shortening. Even Julia, whose books sometimes advocate blending shortening and butter, pooh-poohed the American myth that shortening or lard is necessary for a good crust because American wheat is, allegedly, harder than European wheat. As Julia explained, people used what they had.

I imagined pioneer women in covered wagons, desperate for butter, and thought it has to be true. Without ice, butter could not cross a continent. According to the National Oregon/California Trail Center, a family of four would have needed 600 pounds of flour and 200 pounds of lard for the journey. Recently, I did add a spoonful of leaf lard to a crust, but only a spoonful. I’ll try it again.

An acquaintance asked why I just don’t buy premade crusts. “I can’t taste the difference,” she said, swallowing my butter crust. I can and so can my family, who will not eat a pie made with shortening. Learning to make pastry at a time when butter pastries were promoted made the taste of shortening foreign to me.

Besides, using a premade, shortening-filled crust from a supermarket shelf really isn’t baking.

Along the way, I learned many things. I dislike the flavor and appearance of cornstarch and prefer tapioca flour as a thickener. Oatmeal added to streusel has more melt-in-the-mouth crunch. If the fruit isn’t flavorful, the tang of a matching spirit magnifies its flavor. French peach and pear liqueurs and Calvados are excellent.

However, when it comes to pumpkin, I follow Patricia Wells’ advice: what grows together, goes together. I roast this New World fruit, then flavor it with molasses and bourbon, making it more all American than apple pie.

But pumpkin pie is a true harvest dish, signaling fall and the darkening of the year. Soon, refrigerators will be empty of apples and the last of the pumpkins in the pantry will be pureed and tucked into pastry.

Of course, there are winter pies. Simple custards. Shaker lemon pie. Chocolate pecan. Key lime pie with a graham cracker crust.

But, do they stir the imagination as a glowing red cherry pie does? Or an unctuous peach pie, bright with ginger? Or glazed strawberries in a chocolate crumb crust, topped with freshly whipped cream?

Susan Wozniak, of Easthampton, is a retired journalist and writing professor who writes a monthly column.