Foodie Fame in Winterset

As a kid, I was a famously picky eater. My mother told me that if not for Campbell’s tomato soup, grilled cheese, hamburgers, and whole milk, I might not have reached my adult height of 5’9”.

M-m-m-good. (Photo courtesy of Unsplash.)

In my 20s (before I was a mom or a quilter) I spent Saturday afternoons in the farmhouse out near Pammel Park leafing through cookbooks, listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on WOI Radio. I learned to cook, tackling lasagne, ragout, apple crisp, cakes, pies, and even Baked Alaska.

Though never completely comfortable in a kitchen, in 1984 I edited a favorite recipe collection produced by Iowa Quilters Guild as a fundraiser for a building that would house the quilt collection at Living History Farms.

I helped prepare Quilt Cottage Cookbook for publication more from an editorial than a culinary standpoint.

I promise, Meadowlark Farm Apple Crisp is as delicious now as it was back in the 1980s when I first made it.

At a quilt guild meeting in Missouri, I happened on a terrific chicken salad recipe, served at the luncheon prior to my lecture—chicken salad that contained not celery and grapes (yuck), but pecans and bacon (yum). The maker gave me the recipe, which I tweaked and made my own.

A few years later, my sister-in-law Valerie Fons opened Bread & Water on Washington Island, WI, the location of Sievers School of Fiber Arts, a unique venue where I taught quilting classes every summer for twenty years. Valerie put “Famous Marianne’s Chicken Salad” on her cafe’s menu—an inside joke between us, since my chicken salad wasn’t famous, but (in the quilt world) I was.

Bread & Water on Washington Island closed in 2023 following Valerie Fons’ passing in 2022.

I wish I could have edited the copy. I would have caught that pesky apostrophe on (sic) Quesadilla’s.

And now . . . another cafe, this one in Iowa, has added a bacon-and-pecan-infused chicken salad sandwich to its fare.

Petite Cafe, owned an operated by Naomi Hupton, is just off the town square in Winterset, at 106 W. Court Avenue.

Naomi has made the sandwich her own, adding a few cranberries to the chicken salad and some sprigs of arugula next to the sourdough bread.

Petite Cafe’s hours are Monday through Friday 7 to 1, Saturday 8 to 1. Closed Sunday.

I’m a proud member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, a group of over 60 journalists and authors writing from and about the great state of Iowa, among them Rekha Bashu, Debra Engle, Phoebe Wall Howard, and Beth Hoffman. Check them out, and access all of us here.