For one day only, Peggy Hallee is coming back to cook for Orono.

The founder of former catering powerhouse The Crackerbox Chef will revisit her old stomping grounds when she dishes up her famous Philadelphia Gourmet Salad and Orange-glazed Rolls at a fund-raiser to benefit college-bound women in Maine.

She will be behind the stove to stock the snack bar again at the annual Penobscot Valley Branch of the American Association of University Women’s Used Book Sale from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, April 9, at the Church of Universal Fellowship, 82 Main St., in Orono. (Early birds can get in to start fishing through the stacks at 8 a.m. for an extra $5.)

The effervescent 59-year-old’s cookbook is thicker now than when she left Orono in July 2003; she will be trying out a borrowed recipe for hearty Tomato Barley Hamburger Soup with carrots and celery, and she has adapted some of her well-known dishes so they “could be eaten on a more healthy note, rather than back in the ’70s when we didn’t bother.”

She will also prepare distinctive Baked Ham and Swiss sandwiches, hot or cold, Roasted Turkey Breast and Stuffing sandwiches with cranberry mayonnaise, and Old-fashioned New England Fish Chowder with a colonial chowder cracker, made from her grandmother’s recipe. Patrons also can pile Philadelphia Gourmet Salad – with iceberg lettuce, spinach, bacon, peas, scallions and eggs – onto their plates, but don’t ask Hallee what’s in the flavorful dressing. She’ll never tell.

“I just cook, I don’t always measure,” Hallee said. “I just know when it is right.”

And the rolls – oh, those delicious, fluffy, mouth-watering Orange-glazed Rolls – will be back, too, filling the vestry of the church with the warm aroma of a bakery just as book hunters begin to file in to fill their cartons with literary finds.

“If I had a nickel for every one of those rolls I’ve made, I’d have a villa in Europe,” Hallee, a member of the AAUW since the mid-’70s, said, but that’s not to say she has grown bored with them. By varying the classic recipe, she has created dipping bread for savory soups, hot-cross buns to pair with steaming cups of Orange Pekoe tea, and even a glazed, bunny-shaped loaf in celebration of Easter.

But she has been on a break from baking her treats for the public – mostly city events and AAUW gatherings – since closing the family catering business.

“In the ’80s, we had to make a decision,” she said. Her two children “were tired of working in [the catering business] all the time, and my husband couldn’t help us anymore. We had to make the decision to hire more people or go out on top, and I chose to go out on top.”

Hallee, originally from Waterville, is making the two-hour trip north from Cooper, where she and her husband Neal, once a professor of agricultural engineering at the University of Maine, have retired, because the book sale will help raise money for scholarships for women, and that is one cause Hallee takes immense pride in backing.

“I am from an age when women stay at home, and that’s what they do,” said Hallee, who earned a bachelor’s degree in history with a concentration in human relations from Emmanuel College in Boston and a graduate degree in history with sociology and anthropology minors from the University of Maine. “If that’s what they do, that’s great, but there were women who wanted to go out and do things, and that just wasn’t the climate. The AAUW puts women first and their causes and their ideas first and fights for them.”

Book donations welcome anytime at Orono Public Library or the church side entrance on Juniper Street between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. April 8. For information, call 945-6711.