Director’s Desk | Katherine’s legacy and passion for food are cherished
One time it was biscuits and gravy, and another, crepes and Greek yogurt. Along the way, Katherine Deumling developed a signature Street Roots breakfast: vegetable frittata, pumpkin bread and fruit.
“My list of requests from vendors of dishes they’d like me to make is a mile long, and I so enjoy our rousing discussions about food and everything else,” Deumling wrote.
She strove to accommodate many requests, biking to the Old Town office to share her “creative, scrappy cooking,” as she described it, with Street Roots vendors.
Katherine Deumling died July 12 from metastasized breast cancer.
Deumling was a cooking legend. She credited her childhood in Germany, her mother, and her fellowship years studying cooking in Italy and Mexico with laying the groundwork for her cook-with-what-you-have philosophy based on joy and justice.
Deeply involved with the international and local Slow Food movement, she served as Slow Food U.S.A. board chair. For nearly a decade and a half, she also ran Cook With What You Have, a business offering classes (I attended my fair share), employee wellness programs, and an innovative cooking site helping people use farmer’s market produce to cook seasonally.
She urged people to be kind to themselves about food.
Deumling and Street Roots were a perfect match. An active reader of the paper, she would often email me about articles. She had lively conversations with vendors, discussing everything from planning barbecues to discussing how to set up a kitchen with a vendor who was moving from the street to an apartment. She worked on another project with Tina Drake — a staff member who was a vendor at the time — to create a zine of cooking tips while living on the streets. She was sometimes joined by her husband, Brian Detman and their son, Ellis.
FURTHER READING: "The moment she walked in and those smells wafted through the air, it was a 180"
“Some of the vendors are amused at my love of vegetables and vegetables for breakfast that I relentlessly serve in one form or another — often savory bread puddings or frittatas or simply roasted with a sauce,” Deumling wrote. “Even the unfamiliar dishes I serve up are usually enjoyed by most, if not all. However, crepes, pancakes, pumpkin bread and biscuits and gravy have been favorites so far.”
FURTHER READING: "As she flipped pancakes on the griddle"
“Everyone loved the pumpkin bread so much,” Deumling said. “I could always tell you who’s going to want three slices.”
And, oh, that pumpkin bread!
As a tribute to Deumling, we are publishing that pumpkin bread recipe here so you might bake a loaf — and raise your slice to the legacy of food, justice and kindness of Katherine Deumling.
correction: An earlier version stated Deumling's birth year as 1973.
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