Talking with Patsy Stroble
by Brian Thomas
Patsy Stroble grew up in a family of skilled, committed cooks, so it’s hard for her to remember a time when she wasn’t creating in the kitchen. As an adult, she says, “I’ve always cooked for my family, and enjoyed baking.”
That’s an understatement. Until it closed in 2007, Stroble’s bakery was a fixture on Main Street in Kent for 30 years. Who knows how many tens of thousands of pies, cakes, cookies, scones, rolls, bread loaves, and other dainties passed from her ovens and out the door at 14 North Main Street?
Stroble generously agreed to hold two baking workshops to prepare the period-themed treats for the April 17th Musicale and Spirited Tea Party held by the Kent Historical Society. All the savories were baked by the workshop participants. For many, it was going back to the time when they could satisfy their sweet tooth with a visit to Stroble’s bakery.
“We moved up here,” she remembers, there weren’t many bakeries around. “I took some classes over at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, just to see if I was on track. I had great fun doing that. But I was pretty much self-taught.”
So with her two college-age daughters, Kari and Laura, she turned a cottage on their property in Sharon into a bakery. After about a year and half, they moved the irresistible baking vibes down to Kent, to where 109 Cheese now is, at 14 North Main Street.
Empty for years before the bakery warmed into life, the building is historic and fascinating. Her business started in the newer section, which had a modern cement slab, but as she expanded into the rest of the structure, the other sections had no slab at all. She installed stairs to make use of the upper floors. Eventually Stroble used almost every corner of the building.
Remnants of an old grain elevator lurked in the attic, a relic of the era when the building had been a grange. “You pulled on a rope. It was big, kind of like dumbwaiter. When I left, the wooden cogs for the hoist were still in position.”
Before turning to her baking business, Stroble worked at several different kinds of jobs, including laboratory work for Sloan Kettering in Rye, New York. Her training was in biochemistry, and at that point people were looking at enzymes as a possible solution to cancer.
Was it a leap from the lab to the kitchen? Not really. She finds her biochemistry training useful in baking. “I was always very happy doing what they called bench work, choosing and manipulating ingredients, and the baking worked right into that.” It turns out that preparing wonders in the kitchen is benchwork of a kind, too. In biochemistry and in cooking, workers in the lab discover new, valuable things, sometimes by accident. Patsy Stroble says, “Both are creative processes.”