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‘BREAD LADY’ SHOWS SANDALS TOURISTS ‘IT’S A PIECE OF CAKE’
AN EXUMA resident is serving as a one-woman tourism ambassador by treating hundreds of visitors to Sandals Emerald Bay to home-baked bread every week.
Valerie Rolle Tonny is known as the resort’s ‘Bread Lady’, having followed in her father’s footsteps. “I never knew how he could make bread that tasted so good, but I was going to stay by his side until I learned,” she said. She now creates loaves, buns, twists and tarts with a distinct Bahamian taste – coconut, guava, dilly, potato, banana, pumpkin.
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“The guests love it and I bake for them, even when it’s raining,” Mrs Rolle Tonny said. “Mr Mutton (Sandals general manager) will tell me: ‘Ms Valerie, don’t you go out there now, I don’t want you getting wet.’ But I just tell him I’m going because I love what I do.
“I tell him the rain’s going to let up by the time I am ready to serve, and I love seeing the smiles on my guests’ faces when I hand them the warm loaf. I do corn bread, guava, coconut, dilly, whatever is in season, and they tell me: ‘Ms Valerie, this is the best bread I ever tasted in my life’.”
Mrs Rolle Tonny left school at 14 to help out on the family farm in Exuma. She grew the corn, picked it, shucked the cob and ground it on a mill in the kitchen for grits and corn bread. Farm to table was not a fad or a novelty. For Exumians such as Mrs Rolle Tonny and other Family Islanders, it was just the way things were. She once served 300 on the farm.
Born a Rolle, she has been married for 55 years, and though she attempted to retire in 2016 to look after her husband, a mason who was injured in a truck accident that has severely limited his mobility, it was not long before she was itching to work again. Sandals was happy to have her back at the brick oven they built for her in 2012, and in the pantry where she rules.
“I meet people from all walks of life and from all over the world,” says Mrs Rolle Tonny, one of hundreds of Bahamian staff members at the resort. “Baking the bread is what I love. It’s a piece of cake.”
