JUST IN TIME
Our daily bread
}} The rise and fall of bakeries and
home baking throughout our local area
The wonderful aroma of freshly baked bread wafts from the inner sanctum of A.B. Terry’s bakery, confectionary and restaurant at 117 Kent Street in downtown Lindsay. The loaves emerging from Terry’s state-of-the art ovens represent only one of the many offerings found in this hunger-inducing establishment — it’s the middle of June, after all, and the wedding season is fast approaching. Anyone getting married in this year of 1901 will want to select one of the stylish wedding cakes which have made Terry famous far and wide across Victoria County. A dainty display of delicious delicacies graces the window, through which lunching patrons see a horsedrawn bread wagon from William McWatters’ bakery make its way down Kent Street. McWatters and his son operate a bakery over yonder in the east ward, with an oven capable of churning out 400 loaves of bread at a time. McWatters and Terry are just two of the many bakers making the mouths of local residents water with warm and fresh goods at the turn of the 20th century. Let’s pause the picture there and fast-forward almost seven decades. It’s late August of 1967, and the famously nostalgic Ford Moynes pens a column for the Lindsay Daily Post in which he laments the dearth of home baking. “In very few farm homes today can be smelled the wonderful aroma of home made bread,” Moynes wistfully writes. Mass-produced loaves wrapped in plastic bags and purchased 10 or 15 at a time mark the end of an era in Ford Moynes’ imagination. Or did it? Pause the picture yet again and fastforward another 50-plus years. It’s the middle of April, 2020. Yeast is almost impossible to find in the local grocery stores. “We have a limited flour supply” has become a familiar message. Social media feeds
IAN McKECHNIE, WRITER-AT-LARGE
light up with pictures of concoctions that would make A.B. Terry and William McWatters proud. Home baking, it seems, has made a triumphal comeback, at least while people isolated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This rise in Canadians baking up a storm brings to mind memories of bakeries and bakers long gone. For Rae Fleming of Argyle, the bread from Southern’s Bakery in Cannington left an indelible impression. “They must have been using unbleached flour, which meant that the bread was pale yellow,” Fleming remembers. “Of course I knew
Bill Gill, whose father Herb ran a bakery in Bobcaygeon.
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