The Knead to Bake

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For a young cook at a restaurant in Princeton, N.J., it was no small feat to speak with the owner, so the cook dutifully made an appointment. His intent? The pancake recipe used for a dozen years or more wasn’t that good.

So make up a batch, the owner told Leslie Prickett many decades ago. And he did.

His pancakes were so light “they almost flew off the grill,” Prickett recalled recently.

As for the restaurant owner, he uttered those words a cook just loves to hear: “You just keep doing what you’re doing.”

A half-century or so later, Prickett does what he does in a restored farmhouse on a dirt road about a mile off U.S. Route 1 in the Washington County town of Pembroke. After a long career as a restaurant owner-chef in New Jersey, Prickett and his wife, Gloria, are making customers happy with bread.

And honey. And granola, jams and jellies, herbs, eggs, pickles, free-range chicken, pizza, cookies and Christmas wreaths.

“But the focus is the bread,” Gloria stressed.

Country loaves, raisin bread, multigrain, even bridge rolls – Leslie Prickett bakes up to 180 loaves a week during the summer, and a smaller number the rest of the year. The couple works on the honey together, and Gloria handles most of the rest of the products.

Leslie Prickett’s love of cooking goes back to his father’s interest in the floral world.

“During the Depression, my father was very versatile. He did carpentry, and weaving rugs in a mill. He built five greenhouses – his deepest love was flowers,” Prickett recalled. But it was a time when people didn’t have the money for flowers.

“I thought, people need food. My interest was food. I had a love for it, a taste for it. That’s a gift,” he said.

Prickett used his gift in France during World War II, organizing supplies and cooking for 350 U.S. soldiers. He would go to a local bakery and trade flour for French bread, “for the men, so I could feed them correctly,” he explained.

Good food provided the soldiers not only nourishment, but a boost to their morale, he said. “I was trying to replace their mother’s cooking.”

Once out of the service, Prickett went to work cooking in restaurants on the Jersey shore, working winters in Florida.

“In 1955, I bought the Captain’s Inn,” he said, a place he owned in New Jersey for four decades. In the ’60s, he also spent time studying at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, although he couldn’t stay long enough to graduate.

He’s owned the farmhouse in Pembroke for 30 years, purchasing it after he and first wife, Betty, became intrigued with Maine on vacation.

A few years ago, after Betty had died, Prickett heard about a bed-and-breakfast in Lubec that served dinner by reservation. So he stopped by Christie’s at South Bay and met Gloria Christie, also widowed.

She wasn’t serving dinner at the time, she told Prickett. Upon finding out that he also was a cook, she added, “I think you should be inviting me to dinner.”

A short time later, he did just that, serving her salmon rosettes, potato latkes, filet mignon and fresh bread. Now, they’ve been married nearly two years.

“I had never had any man cook for me,” Gloria Prickett said. He further cemented his reputation on the day she moved into the farmhouse.

“My prized possession was my raspberry beds, which I had brought from New Hampshire,” she said. “Leslie dug up 200 of the plants and planted them that day” in Pembroke.

Gloria Prickett has her own cooking heritage.

“My mother was probably the best cook in North Vassalboro,” she said of the woman who raised five children in a Franco-American household and also took in boarders.

In Pembroke, Gloria Prickett ushers visitors through the closed-in patio area where her husband does his baking – and on to the rest of the kitchens.

“What we call the breakfast kitchen was originally the woodshed,” she explained. The next kitchen, on the same floor, was the winter kitchen, and it has a wood stove the couple still uses.

Her husband bought an old barn in order to get sills for the archway into the front room, which boasts a huge fireplace with an adjacent pizza oven. Pizza is available some Saturdays by special order.

Downstairs is what Gloria Prickett calls her kitchen.

“Every bit of this was dug out bucket by bucket” before the room was constructed, she explained.

There’s French tile and marble in the center island, and Mexican tile along the wall. Beyond the kitchen is a wine cellar, the only room that has a stone foundation.

But the most unusual space, dug out with a backhoe, is what the couple calls the cave de vin – the wine cellar – actually a family-size dining room with its own large fireplace.

“We get a lot of enjoyment out of the fireplaces,” Leslie Prickett said.

Seeing the space, it’s not hard to believe that he has made several trips to Italy over the years. The country where he frequently visited his daughter was the inspiration for the name chosen for his property – Cinque Terre, or Five Lands.

“In Italy, there are five villages known as Cinque Terre,” he explained. And, Cinqueterre Farm comprises five parcels of land he purchased since coming to Maine.

Offering the bread and other goods started with a simple decision to put up a small sign advertising the organic vegetables the Pricketts grow.

As for the European-style bread, regardless of the kind, its roots are in Prickett’s family, too.

“I always enjoyed baking. My mother made the best homemade white bread. She set her dough the night before,” he said, revealing a major clue to the success of his loaves.

One of his methods involves “levain, French for leaven, a starter without yeast. It takes three days – it picks up yeast in the air,” he explained. The bread is made, he said, with “pure, natural ingredients and an artisan quality.”

The “season” is really Mother’s Day to Labor Day, but he does have customers at other times, as well. Bread is sold not only at the farm, but at Raye’s Mustard Mill in Eastport.

During the summer, the Pricketts rent out the two-bedroom Ledge Cottage, with a view of Ox Cove, and in the winter they offer 24-inch balsam wreaths made from greenery grown on their 600-acre tree farm.

On a nice day, people stop by to see the acre of wildflowers and sunflowers, the grapevines, apple trees and raspberry plants.

They also want vegetables or a jar of jam or jelly, Gloria Prickett said, “Rhubarb, strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, blackberry, and last, but not least, wild crabapple – everything in season.”

The crabapple trees have grown taller over the years, but she’s not deterred. She’s been known to climb in the bucket of her husband’s tractor in order to reach the prized crabapples.

“I do picking, canning and preserving, and we both weed,” she said. But the Pricketts do know when to stop and take a breath, and do so on a daily basis.

“By 5:30 p.m. we stop, take showers and dress for dinner – something special every night,” Gloria Prickett said. “We’re passionate about this cooking.”

“It’s the kind of food I believe in,” Leslie added.

So do their customers, it seems. The guest book at Cinqueterre Farm shows signatures from the Virgin Islands, Los Angeles, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, England, Thailand, Alaska, Germany, Switzerland, and, of course, all parts of Maine.

Each purchase echoes the words of that restaurant owner so many years ago: “You just keep doing what you’re doing.”

For information on Cinqueterre Farm and its products, contact Gloria and Leslie Prickett at 726-4766, or e-mail cinqueterre@acadia.net.