When I was new to Aroostook County in the 1970s, I was told I MUST go to Ma Dudley’s Homestead in Castle Hill for dinner. I don’t remember my first meal there, but I recall thinking this is a place I could bring my parents, who were not thrilled about my move to northern Maine, if they ever decided to visit.
Memories of Ma Dudley surfaced recently in conversations with her granddaughter and with the couple who produced her cookbook in 1977.
Avis Dudley served about 20-30 people at a time in the dining and living rooms of her husband’s ancestral farmhouse on the Dudley Road about 10 miles from Presque Isle. Guests ordered their meals when they made their reservations, selecting from a menu that included chicken, salmon, ham, pork chops, roast beef, turkey, Cornish game hen, Alaskan king crab legs, lobster, shrimp and duck. She offered four to six entrees at a time. Each meal began with a salad, which she “built” instead of tossing, and a plate of hot caramel rolls, for which she was famous.
She served “family style” — large platters of meat and serving dishes of locally grown vegetables — with her granddaughter and high school students waiting tables. Her kitchen contained four stoves, each with two ovens. Refrigerators, freezers and a walk-in cooler were located elsewhere in the house.
“My grandmother and her organic farming-gardening neighbors were active participants in the University of Maine Extension agents’ programs to bring the most recent nutritional and delicious recipes and cooking techniques to the community,” said granddaughter Carol “Missy” McKnight in a recent email. “Perhaps my grandmother’s restaurant selection of local farmers’ vegetables was influenced by Ellen Emerson,” the Scottish immigrant who raised Avis Dudley and taught her to cook.
“My grandmother loved to cook and loved meeting the people who came to the farmhouse to eat,” Missy said. “When she had a day off, she would get up early and cook something special for the school teachers who lived there.”
Ma Dudley’s Homestead was popular with military personnel from the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone and with local and visiting businesspeople who returned again and again.
“What makes me happiest is when people from the (military) service say they have eaten around the world and this is the best food they have ever had,” Mrs. Dudley told me for an article that appeared in the Bangor Daily News May 18, 1977, when I was a news correspondent.
That article previewed a cookbook she expected released in two months. Today, “Ma Dudley’s Secrets of the Dudley Homestead” is a collector’s item, selling for as much as five times the original $6.50 cover price, for those who can find it.
Gene and Margaret Wright of Presque Isle know that cookbook well, and they still have the plates and negatives used to print it. Doing business as Wright Printing at the time, the Wrights designed and printed Ma Dudley’s collection of recipes. Margaret did the typesetting, editing and collating; Gene did the printing and cutting. But there was much more to it.
“Looking back, I don’t know how we ever accomplished it,” Gene said recently. “Avis drove up in her light blue Mercury Cougar, a sporty car for a woman her age (81). She brought in a full-sized, hard-sided blue Samsonite suitcase filled with her recipes — hand-written on yellow legal pads.”
Margaret’s task was more than typing. “Mrs. Dudley and I had to decide what recipes to select and where to put the anecdotes she wanted to include with the recipes.”
Then they organized them into sections: breakfast, salads, breads, soups and chowders, vegetables, meats and fish, main dish and desserts.
“I would do it again,” Margaret said, adding that the anecdotes were a highlight of the project for her. “It was a delight to know her and a unique experience to put together a cookbook from beginning to end.”
At times Margaret wondered if she was interpreting the measurements correctly and would check with her mother: “Should this be a tablespoon or a teaspoon?”
The Wrights contacted the art department at the University of Maine at Presque Isle for an illustrator and found student Christina Wyatt Moore to create the pen-and-ink drawings on the cover and the title page of each section.
Gene cut the large sheets of paper by hand for the first printing, an arduous task he would not repeat. For the second printing, he carried the paper to Presque Isle High School to be cut in the graphic arts department. By the third printing, he decided to have the paper cut by the paper company before it was delivered.
When pages for the first 2,000 copies of the 80-page book had been printed, Mrs. Dudley went on the air for an interview with local radio show host Dewey DeWitt. She told listeners that she would be heading to Wright Printing as soon as the show was over and would be happy to sign copies for anyone who wanted one.
That was news to Gene and Margaret, who were busy assembling the books as they listened to the broadcast.
“We had about six copies done,” Gene recalled. “The pages were cross-stacked on the collator, ready to be put together with a spiral binding.” As the Wrights scrambled to bind the books, the print shop filled with people even before Avis arrived.
“You could hear tires screeching all over town,” Gene joked. “Avis kept customers entertained in conversation while we worked.”
Avis liked to recall how she got started in November 1963, when the Mapleton Lions Club asked if they could meet at her home twice a month. “They enjoyed themselves and I enjoyed having them,” she wrote in an introduction to the cookbook.
The next May she had requests from 18 people for dinner on Mother’s Day. That summer, she served various women’s groups and other small groups on occasion. “In a year or two I was very well started in a pleasant small venture of my own,” she wrote. “It’s always a pleasure to see the happy faces of my guests as they leave my home.”
Eventually my parents were among those happy people. Perhaps Ma Dudley helped them understand why I had settled in Aroostook County.
An interview with Avis Dudley is housed at the University of Maine in the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History of the Maine Folklife Center. For more information visit www.umaine.edu/folklife.
Kathryn Olmstead is a former University of Maine associate dean and associate professor of journalism living in Aroostook County, where she publishes the quarterly magazine Echoes. Her column appears in this space every other Friday. She can be reached at kathryn.olmstead@umit.maine.edu or P.O. Box 626, Caribou, ME 04736.