Baking with Bonnet Novelists

The Facebook post read: Come Bake With Us! Author Chat with Sherry Gore. Ladies Luncheon, Holiday Baking. Door Prizes! Limited Seating. Tickets $45.

“It’s on a Saturday! Let’s go!” I say to Mom. “It’ll be a fun thing to do together.”

Both of us like Sherry’s cookbook, Me, Myself, and Pie and her memoir, The Plain Choice. We knew Sherry recently moved to Bird-in-Hand, which is close to us. So we signed up and last Saturday, we drove to the Bird-in-Hand fire hall, where the event was being held.

When we pull into the parking lot, we see a woman wearing a blue dress and black apron. “Looks like we’ve come to the right place.”

We get out of the car, and she comes to meet us. “My name is Tina.” We introduce ourselves, and then Tina tells us, “Plans have changed. We’re actually having the cookie bake at Sherry’s house. “

She gives us directions, and we walk there, since Sherry lives nearby. “Well, a home will be cozier,” I think. It’s cookie-baking weather— a cold December day, and a drafty fire hall doesn’t sound too inviting.

Sure enough, Sherry’s house turns out to be cozy and warm, a beautiful old farmhouse with white walls and sheer curtains to let in lots of light.

It’s a bit crowded. There’s twelve women here for the cookie baking, plus Roxie— a large, short-haired dog, thumping back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room.

“I tried to find a dog-sitter,” apologizes Sherry, just after we get in the door. “She’ll calm down. She’s just so excited you’re all here.”

The kitchen table is filled with cookie baking ingredients and the dining room table is set for brunch. Sherry and her friend, Tina, have been up since 4 a.m. Tina is from Virginia, and she travels regularly to Lancaster County to buy food for her store.

We sit down in the dining room for brunch. As we eat our yogurt and baked oatmeal, Sherry, a former disc jockey turned Amish-Mennonite pie-maker, talks about how she became an author.

“I was living in Pinecraft, Florida. One day I wanted to buy a local cookbook for visiting friends. And I realized there weren’t any cookbooks for the local Pinecraft community. So I decided to compile one.”

Sherry tells us about sorting through hundreds of recipes while sitting by the bedside of her sick daughter. Eventually her Pinecraft cookbook had six hundred recipes. She self-published it, sold some copies and didn’t expect it to go much further.

“Then, one day, I received an e-mail from someone claiming to work for National Geographic.”

“I thought someone was playing a cruel joke on me!”

Sherry researched the Nat Geo staff member name, and sure enough, the request was genuine. They wanted to her to appear in a documentary about the Plain People.

The documentary mentioned Sherry’s cookbook, and her writing career soared. Today she has written six books published by major publishers, including two cookbooks, her memoir, and three bonnet novels.

She’s not the only author at the event. Rachel Good also writes bonnet novels (Amish fiction). Several of the other women are book reviewers for major Christian publishers.

After brunch, we split up into two groups. One group goes to the kitchen to bake cookies and the rest of us dip peanut-butter Ritz crackers in melted chocolate.

Two women from North Carolina work with Mom and I. They’re both close to Mom’s age. One is a school psychologist and the wife of a retired military officer. The other woman likes to garden, can, and quilt, and wishes she’d have grandchildren. (She’s impressed that Mom has twenty-four.)

Since there’s limited counter space and oven space, we can’t make as many cookies as was originally planned and there’s plenty of time to chat. Janet tells us how her mother-in-law lived in an orphanage run by nuns in WWII Italy, and came to the United States—alone at age twelve.

Another woman talks about her first day of work at a cheese packing plant when she was a young girl. Her job was to put lids on the cheese boxes and she couldn’t keep up. A young man who worked there started helping her. It’s practically the plot for a bonnet novel. They’ve been married for sixty years.

When most of the baking is done, we sit down for lunch. It’s chicken pot pie, a stew-like dish with large, square noodles— traditional Lancaster County food.

It’s unusually delicious, so delicious that Tina, who brought the pot pie from her store, starts questioning Sherry.

“Did you add something?”

“Well, I added some fresh ground black pepper.”

“Anything else?”

“And a pan of melted butter.”

After we eat the buttery pot pie and finish with chocolate pie, it’s time for door prizes. I win a small bread pan with the word “Gnome for the Holidays” and gnome motifs.

Sherry and Tina give everyone a book— mostly bonnet novels. I pick out a suspense bonnet novel (which I much prefer to the romances), and Mom gets a collection of true stories by Amish and Mennonite women.

We package up our cookies, and collect our books and coats, and say good-bye to our new friends. It’s time to go home.

Most of us will never get that call from National Geographic. But baking a mean cookie (or an improved dish of chicken pot pie)— that’s a goal we all can reach for.

We may live without poetry, music, and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

~ Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st earl of Lytton (1831–91)