Luckily, a group of 50 women on a mission to raise money for health-care projects in the region gathered hundreds of family recipes from the area, creating a timeless cookbook. It is like they preserved these recipes in a pie tin and wrapped it in plastic for students of Cape Fear cuisine to enjoy and study years later.

For 128 years, the Ministering Circle has come together every fall, made their best recipes, put them in pie tins and covered them in plastic wrap and sold them to the public on an autumn Saturday. This Saturday, the women will tote out all the goods, including jams, pickles, jellies, casseroles, pies, their famous cookbooks “Favorite Recipes of the Lower Cape Fear” and a slew of raffle ticket prizes in front of a line of locals at the Elks Lodge. The sale only lasts an hour for a reason -- everything goes fast. All the goods are frozen, so members tell me locals stock up for the holidays -- there are gifts and things to stow away for entertaining guests.

And those little pie tins have had the power to win over crowds of people who come back each year and to raise more than $50,000 in scholarships to nursing students at Cape Fear Community College and at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. With zero overhead, proceeds from the bake sale were able to purchase a horse for one of the ambulances in the area in the 1800s and, thanks to the Ministering Circle, Wilmington purchased its very first X-ray machine. At James Walker Memorial Hospital, one of the areas first hospitals, there was a room where patients who could not afford to pay stayed -- the patient's room and board at the hospital was covered thanks to casseroles and pies.

I dined and dished with a few members of the Ministering Circle last week ahead of the sale and they showed me chicken pot pies sans vegetables (a kid favorite), chicken tetrazzini, jars of pear conserve, jars of cashews that were roasted with rosemary and Kentucky Derby pie. Over some pink lemonade, Margaret Robison, Meade Van Pelt, Nancy Horton, Cathy Halligan and Carolyn Hall and I laughed at some stories of the organization's past. They also took me through their cookbook, which has been printing for decades.

Watching these women chat about recipes in this cookbook is a sight to behold. It was as if they had every recipe memorized they had made these favorites for so many years. And there are certainly favorites, according to this group as they remember a time when their mothers and grandmothers brought them along to Ministering Circle functions.

Everyone goes wild over the ham biscuits at the sale, they tell me. Jocelyn Lynch holds the secret to the biscuits, which are only the size of a quarter, stuffed with ham and orange marmalade.

Two years ago some members got together with Lynch to learn the secret recipe so more people could make the fast-selling biscuits.

Nancy Horton laughed telling me she barely made the first biscuit in the training session before giving up, and others nodded their heads. The process is labor intensive and fit for only a perfectionist. Most of the 50 stick to recipes they have made over and over again and could probably make in their sleep.

Carolyn Hall tells me she makes her favorite crab casserole these days. She uses only jumbo lump crab meat to avoid any shells making their way into the dish.

"I used to do a lot of the pickling, but my pickling days are in the past," Hall told me. She is one of the oldest of the 50 women at 90.

Hall also told me about "beaten biscuits," a recipe in the cookbook she has made for years. It's an incredible old recipe that consists of essentially flour, Crisco and baking powder plus a few other ingredients. It is so old-fashioned, it isn't for everyone, Hall warns. She actually uses a break (two rollers with a crank) to blister the dough before baking it. She made this recipe for her brother for years. When he died, she brought some over to her sister-in-law's house.

"She looked at me with those biscuits and said, 'Carolyn, I'm going to tell you right now that to me those are the nearest to nothing I have ever tasted,'" Hall said, laughing.