The Measure of Her Worth
story by Donna Hecker
Chef Ouita Michel met Freda Raglin when they worked together at a well-known Lexington, Ky. catering company before Ouita opened Holly Hill Inn. They’ve remained dear friends since and Freda’s famously light and buttery yeast rolls often grace our Derby and holiday tables. Freda is also a Midway neighbor and we enjoyed whiling away a recent afternoon in her bright, spacious kitchen.
Freda Raglin is petite, dignified and soft-spoken. Sitting at her kitchen table, one of two in a combined kitchen and dining room, and both tables large enough to seat six or eight people, she shared stories from a long life filled with family, food and friendship.
Our conversation meandered: a childhood in rural Madison county, two marriages, a large blended family, a career with a society caterer. And through it all, the food she cooked for her own family and others.
There was a time – before foodies and celebrity chefs – when good cooking was the province of people (mostly women) like Freda Raglin. They worked in private homes or catering kitchens, creating food that was so good, prepared with so much skill, that their inevitable departure was considered an insurmountable tragedy.
Freda grew up as Elfreda Miller in a house on two acres near Middletown, Ky., just outside Berea. One of six children – four girls and two boys – she and her siblings always had work to do helping their parents around the house and garden.
Their father raised a couple of hogs every year and planted a large vegetable garden; Mother cooked and canned and quilted and sewed all their clothes. The girls helped with cooking, the boys fired up the coal-burning stove, and everyone tended the garden. Freda remembers her mother waking the kids up early, and sending them outside with a #2 washtub and instructions to fill it with green beans, roughly 15 gallons worth.
Somehow, they still found time for mischief. LIke the time she and a sister mixed some of the hogs’ feed grain with curing salt and fed it to the laying hens. It turned out to be the chickens’ final meal and no one ever figured out why.
Freda was eleven when she baked her first batch of biscuits from scratch, on that coal-fired stove. A few years later, she produced a complicated cake shingled in thinly-sliced apples and glazed with melted apple jelly. No one at school believed she’d made it until her sister stepped in to corroborate.
All her life, Freda has enjoyed cooking, especially baking. She was the head baker at the catering company where she worked with Ouita Michel, and she guarded her corner of the kitchen fearlessly, telling one would-be pilferer, “nothing but brown sugar over here!” They were known collectively as Freda and Ouita and one often answered for the other.
As we chatted at her table, Freda had a pot of chicken simmering on the stove, for chicken croquettes. She makes them the old-fashioned way, soaking bread in the stock to create a panade for thickening the croquettes. Freda stressed how important it was to mince the celery and onion really, really fine before mixing everything together to be rolled in crushed saltines and fried.
She used to make salmon croquettes the same way for her second husband, Reverend James Raglin. And laughs at his reaction when he came home one night and she served them with peas and mashed potatoes. “He asked, ‘Where’s the rice? Where’s the mushroom soup?’ He went right down to the store and bought a can of mushroom soup and I thinned it out with milk to make gravy. That was the only way he’d ever eat salmon croquettes.”
Freda and James Raglin married later in life – she was 51 and he 63 – and would have been married 30 years this coming November, had he not passed away in 2009. Freda explained how the family name came down through Virginia from a slave-holding family named Ragland. Her husband’s branch changed it to Raglin to distance and distinguish themselves from the family who’d enslaved their ancestors.
Between the two of them, they had a dozen grown children. And hosted gatherings of up to 50 people at a time before handing that duty off to a son living across the street; especially after a Thanksgiving dinner was reduced to “nothing but bones.” But Freda kept on cooking.
She believes her skill was “just a gift from God. I guess I’ll go to my grave baking.” Freda’s rolls are legendary, and she can make every kind of cake and pie imaginable but her favorite was an amaretto pound cake that she often made for weddings. “I enjoyed doing those things; making recipes up.”
“I was serving my amaretto cake at a party one day and there was this gentleman who was hanging around with the biggest scowl on his face. I was terrified that something was wrong. Finally he asked me, ‘Did you make this cake?’ I said, yes I did. Then he told me it was the ‘best damn cake I ever put in my mouth.’”
Freda has a secret. “I make all kinds of desserts but I don’t eat homemade desserts. I love to make a peach cobbler, though and I’ll eat that. Or a little jam cake or chocolate cake. But pies? Lemon, chocolate, butterscotch, you name it. I won’t eat it. Lace cookies? Made them for 40 years and I’ve never tasted one. Not even a crumb. My sister Vickie thinks I’m crazy.”
Then she showed me a pan covered in foil, sitting on the counter. Inside was her guilty pleasure, a vanilla cake made from a boxed mix. Freda joked that there’s just something about its artificial flavoring which she can’t resist. And it’s nice to think of Freda – so creative, so talented, who’s cooked so much good food for the rest of us to enjoy – taking a little shortcut here and there for herself.
There’s nothing artificial about Freda Raglin; she is 100% genuine. And we can’t resist the pull of her stories or the lingering aroma of her famous yeast rolls or the realization that Freda is a self-taught culinary genius. Her innate skill and ability to create delicious dishes by taste and touch are a treasure worth preserving. And so is her story.
© 2022, Holly Hill Inn/Ilex Summit, LLC and its affiliates, All Rights Reserved
Related Content
Dressed vs Deviled Eggs
It’s the time of year when our fancy turns to springtime celebrations and racetrack tailgating. Holly Hill Culinary Director Tyler McNabb and Events Chef Scott Darnell share two delightfully different takes on how to dress up (or devil down) your fresh local eggs.
