Cookbook blossoms for local chef

 CHAPMAN, Maine – Start with a healthy dose of history, add in some hints, gather and tweak for 65-plus years, mix with love and good humor, blend in some reminiscing and you have the ingredients for a gift that will last long after its author is gone.
     exactly what Phyllis Hutchins hoped for as she began her cookbook back in 1990. The book started as a gift to be passed on to her family and, much like her cooking, grew beyond what she had ever imagined.
Hutchins started cooking as a young child in New Brunswick where she watched her mother continually put together meals for her large family.
“She had eight kids and Dad, and there was always a grandmother or an aunt or an uncle or something,” Hutchins recalled. “I just sat and watched her and asked her if I could do this and that, and she was very willing because getting three meals a day on the table for 12 to 15 people is hard work.”
Hutchins says her mother put her right to work, giving her the space she needed to try things, make mistakes and try them again, and she says that cooking came pretty naturally. Soon she was fully in charge of her own kitchen, keeping husband, Leonard, and four children well fed. Living in a small town, it wasn’t long before the neighbors started to take notice.
The family made a home in Oxbow where the logging industry was booming. As the story goes, Hutchins was approached to feed the crews by Ronald Fournier, a logging boss in the 1960s.
“He asked me if I’d feed the men because there were no restaurants in Oxbow,” Hutchins said. “He asked if I’d give them lunch if they stopped by around noontime and I said I’d never fed people before and he said ‘Leonard and the kids look pretty well fed.’ So we took the living room of our house apart and put in a table and I started feeding the truck drivers.”
When the Oxbow Lodge went up for sale several years later, being professional hosts seemed like a natural fit for the family. The Hutchins made a go of their business which soon grew to include what they called a ‘schmorgasboard’ on Sundays, which was an informal meal prepared so that people could just drop in.
“Some Sundays we’d feed 200 people,” Hutchins said. “They came from miles around. They’d have a nice drive and a good dinner and it was just a nice day out for older people and families … We loved the kids. I’d make up bags of cookies for them to take home when they went.”
Those cookies are now famous all over Aroostook County, selling at the annual Agency on Aging craft fair and making their way back into the trucking industry thanks to her son who introduced them to his maintenance crew.
Hutchins finished her cookbook, called “Sixty-Five Years of Country Cooking: And Still Stirring,” in 2004 and the small project fell into the hands of Judy Sherman, co-owner of Oxbow Wreaths/Deep In the Woods Gift Shop in Oxbow, who offered to sell a few. A few indeed sold. Hutchins estimates she and Leonard are on their fourth or fifth printing of 50.
“A piece came out in the Bangor Daily about them and they started really selling. [Judy] called me and said ‘You have to make some more, we’re taking orders,’” Hutchins said.
The books are all type-set, printed and bound at the Hutchins’ home in Chapman. A true family affair, it is edited by the couple’s oldest grandson, Benjamin Hutchins, and the cover and illustrations were done by their youngest grandson, Alan Michaud, at the age of 10.
“He wanted me to have a coat of arms,” Phyllis chuckled. “There’s one page where he made a canister set and one of them has flour spelled “flower,” and I left it right in.”
Phyllis and Leonard are in the process of adding a few new pages to the latest run of books, which are set to include a few of the cookie recipes adjusted for a crowd, as well as a chocolate dip for the peanut butter cookies, which Phyllis says have become one of her favorites.
At 78, Phyllis does most of her cooking from a wheelchair because osteoporosis has made it difficult to stand up for long periods of time. Her kitchen is adapted with a three-foot table and a moveable cart for her ingredients. Leonard helps to move the cart and anything heavy or awkward.
“He’s a big part of everything,” Phyllis said. “He’s the gopher. He goes and gets things from my storage cupboards and downstairs in the freezer. Now he’s doing the typing. I did the original book … but my eyesight is just about gone. It’s just one of the things you deal with.”
Phyllis says that even after 65 or more years of cooking she still makes mistakes, but that’s never stopped her before. She says it’s just part of the learning process and encourages anyone to give cooking a try.
“Just do it,” she says. “If I have a mistake or something that we can’t eat we just feed it to the birds. Leonard has quite a flock, and we have some fat blue jays out there.”
The cookbooks are available at Oxbow Wreaths/Deep in the Woods Gift Shop for $14.95 each or by mail at $18.95. To order, send a check or money order to Oxbow Wreaths/Deep in the Woods Gift Shop, 685 Oxbow Road, Oxbow 04764, or call (800) 639-9588.