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Kate McClearen cried after one bite of a pumpkin muffin at The Trustees Table, the restaurant at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. “Tastes like my childhood,” she said in a video the couple posted on October 27, TODAY.com reported. Her mother made the same muffins every fall, and the recipe came from this very restaurant.
A Quick Question to a Server
The video starts with Jason, Kate’s husband, asking a server whether any pumpkin muffins were left. The server said yes and brought enough for the whole table, according to TODAY. Kate said she had never had the muffins at the restaurant before.
Kate said her mother has the recipe and makes the muffins, and that she had never had them at the place they came from. Jason, after tasting one, said her mom got the recipe from there. Kate said her mother used to make the muffins every fall, and that she makes them now.
Kate cried after the first bite. Jason told her to let it out. She said she cries at everything and hates it.
The setting is a historic one. The restaurant sits inside the 1839 Trustees’ Office, and Shaker Village describes its Trustees Table as seed-to-table dining, with menus built on produce from the village garden and local farmers.
The Mother Behind the Muffins
Kate stressed that her mother is still alive, TODAY reported. She made most meals from scratch and baked the muffins at the start of each fall.
Jason told TODAY that with her food, she was “very intentional about whoever was around being welcome to the table.”
According to TODAY, Kate’s grandmother styled her house after Williamsburg, in an early American colonial look, and Kate said the restaurant’s dining room reminded her of the one she grew up around.
The Cookbook That Carried the Recipe
The muffins come from a Shaker Pumpkin Muffins recipe by Elizabeth C. Kremer, which appears in a 1970 cookbook of Trustees’ House daily fare recipes from Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, according to TODAY’s recipe page. The page lists 20 minutes of prep, 20 minutes of cooking and a yield of one dozen, and notes that the muffins can be frozen until breakfast guests arrive.
Kristen Flick, the village’s vice president of hospitality, told TODAY that Kremer brought recipes into the restaurant, including tomato celery soup, fried chicken and the pumpkin muffins. Flick said those dishes remain on the menu and in the cookbooks.
Home bakers looking for more fall flavors can try this site’s pumpkin cream cheese bread, apple cider muffins or dairy free pumpkin bread.
Who Elizabeth Kremer Was
Kremer led dining operations at Shaker Village from 1967 until 1986. Shaker Village’s own history of Kremer says she was born in 1901 in Cynthiana, Kentucky, and graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1925 with a degree in home economics. She worked in restaurant management in New York City before opening The French Village restaurant in Kentucky in 1930.
She stepped away from restaurant work in 1940 to raise her daughters, Pem and Evalina, according to the same account. In 1967 she was recruited to Pleasant Hill by Chairman Earl T. Wallace. She started with a small soup-and-sandwich bar in the Old Stone Shop, then moved into the Trustees’ Office for a full restaurant. She retired in 1986 because of her health and died in September 1988.
Kentucky Monthly describes the dining hall as opening in 1968 with Kremer as its first chef. The magazine says fried chicken has been on the menu since she took the reins, alongside Shaker lemon pie, corn pudding and a signature salsify casserole. It says the ingredients come from the farm, which uses biodynamic practices.
Kremer also compiled Welcome Back to Pleasant Hill. The village’s shop lists it as a 92-page softcover with recipes such as watermelon rind pickles, Kentucky hot brown and orange marmalade cookies. The listing shows it as sold out.
What Viewers Wrote Back
Jason said the clip captured “an instant, amazing memory rushing back just from food,” TODAY reported. Viewers answered in kind.
One commenter wrote that they love that food can do that. Another said potato salad at a local barbecue place had once brought them to tears. A third wrote that food holds so many memories and traditions, and one joked that Kate had been “ratatouille-d,” a nod to the Pixar film Ratatouille.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Luca Nebuloni – CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia Commons