Arletta's Kitchen

Where it all started

Arletta was born in 1939 and grew up on a tobacco farm in Ohio, one of many children raised in a household that knew real hardship. Nothing went to waste back then — even the cloth from empty flour sacks was sewn into dresses for the girls in the family, and when it was your turn, you got to pick which sack pattern would become yours.

It was the kind of childhood that teaches you to make something wonderful out of very little. Gregarious, warm, and impossible not to love, Arletta carried that farm-kitchen resourcefulness with her for the rest of her life — and she cooked like it. She passed away in 2017, but the people who knew her still talk about her cooking.

"It's the only pie my wife will eat." — her son, still true to this day.

More than one recipe

Arletta's Apple Pies started this whole thing — a blue ribbon crust, won at Ohio's Perry County Fair in the 1980s, baked into a pie entered by her best friend, Linda Beaver. But pie was never the whole story. Arletta's Kitchen is where we're building out the rest of it: her other recipes, her way of running a kitchen on very little, and the stories that come with both.

A small legacy

This isn't a bakery — not yet, anyway. For now, it's a place to preserve a story: a woman who grew up with very little, cooked with a lot of heart, and left behind a reputation that her family still measures every meal against.

If you knew Arletta, or you've ever had a slice of her pie, we'd love to hear about it.