Where It All Started

Ro first delighted in baking alongside her grandmother Celia in the family’s mid-century Southern California kitchen.

As a child Celia baked in a wood-fired oven in the ‘old country’ taught by her mother and grandmother. Years later, as the eldest daughter in a multi-generation household in NYC, Celia adapted her craft to the relatively more modern turn of the century appliances championed by the iconic 1900’s immigrant homemakers’ guide, The Settlement Cookbook. Her confidence and creativity in the modern kitchen was further inspired by the fresh fruits and vegetables abundant in the west coast community she eventually called home. Celia recalled with fondness her initial encounter with bananas, literally dockside at Ellis Island. This ‘exotic’ tropical fruit was distributed by the resettlement societies greeting the disembarking passengers anxiously awaiting immigration processing. Thereafter, bananas became a comforting staple ingredient and became a part of her family’s quirky ethno-culinary story.

Although Grandma Celia’s recipes and methods are quantifiable and replicable, they are mostly learned with practice and held in muscle memory. Rather than rigid adherence to a standard metric recipe, cooking with Celia was a dynamic, olfactory, tactile and all around sensory-driven experience. She improvised and experimented with available resources and unfamiliar ingredients wherever she lived and cooked with predictably exceptional results. Celia’s granddaughter Ro has continued the family trait of adaptation and innovation. She especially appreciates the abundance of quality vegetables, fruits and grains produced locally in Mendocino County, and celebrates the unique ‘terroir’ of the coastal micro-organisms that instill the naturally fermented and leavened Balabaya baked goods with a distinctly regional flair.