TOPSHAM — On a recent Thursday in June, Jane Manchester is in her immaculate kitchen baking peanut butter blossoms to bring to her widowed dad in Machias. The recipe is on a 3-by-5 card kept in a worn plaid recipe box that once belonged to her mother.
In the last year, Jane has been visiting her dad more frequently. Each visit, she brings a cooler full of dinners and sweets that she’s recreated from the recipes her mother used to make. This visit, she’ll pack whoopie pies in two flavors, pumpkin and chocolate, and “Rachel’s Casserole” along with the blossom cookies, then make the three-hour drive from her home in Topsham.
Norris Manchester lives alone on family land in a modular home on the cliffs next to Roque Bluffs State Park. A retired farmer — “a great farmer,” Jane says — and a father of five who once kept dairy and beef cows, chickens, pigs, hayfields and a huge garden, he’s slowed down. Of course he has. He’s 87.
Norris has given up cooking — though to be honest, he’d only taken it up when his wife was ill. He’s stooped, no longer the imposing man he once was. He struggles to read his watch, and his short-term memory often comes up short. He’s lonely, Jane said. He misses her mother, Norma, his high school sweetheart, his wife of 62 years. She died of lung cancer in 2023.
A picture of Norris and Norma Manchester on their wedding day in June 1961 sits in the Topsham home of their daughter, Jane Manchester. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)
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Compassion aside, those visits weren’t easy. The hours stretched on. Jane had left home for California in her late teens, creating a few decades of distance. She and her dad don’t watch television together or talk politics; they don’t see eye to eye. She could wrap up discussion of any new developments in her own life since her last visit in less than an hour. “It’s a lot of time to be sitting there.”
One day, she got the idea of going through her mom’s recipe box with her father. “‘Do you remember this? Do you remember that?’ That’s how it started,” Jane said. “It gave us something to talk about, and it brought up memories.”
Manchester scooped up the multi-colored metal recipe box from her dad’s kitchen and brought it home. Now, she no longer just lists her mom’s banana cake, date pinwheel cookies, stewed tomatoes and chicken shepherd’s pie. She’s committed to making and delivering them.
COMING OF AGE
Jane Manchester holds a picture of her father, Norris, on his farm in Machias. “My parents took such pride in their farm,” Jane said. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)
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Among the many family photos hanging in Jane’s living room is one of a wagon piled high with hay. Her dad is driving the tractor pulling the wagon back to the barn. Jane and her siblings — kids still — are sitting in the stacked hay they’ve helped to bring in. “This is my summer growing up right here,” she said, pointing to the photo. “It was always ‘The weather! The weather! The weather!’”
When Jane describes her 1960s-’70s childhood, it sounds plucked from the pages of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. The family churned butter, gathered eggs, smoked hams, canned vegetables, drank their own milk and started each day with thick slices of toast from their mother’s homemade bread spread with her homemade jams and jellies. (Her mom made the bread until she died.)
Dinner was at 5 p.m. sharp. “All seven of us sat at the table every night,” Jane said. “That’s where food started for us because we were so proud that everything we had on the table…we did completely ourselves.”
Still, Jane knew from an early age she wanted to get out of Machias and see the world. After high school, she enrolled in the University of New England, but neglected her schoolwork and dropped out. She worked, saved money, then got into her car and drove 3,000 miles to San Diego. She didn’t know a soul. She was 19.
Jane Manchester’s mother, Norma, passed away in 2023. Cooking her mother’s recipes gives Manchester a way to connect and share memories with her 87-year-old father, Norris. When she’s able, Jane likes to serve him a hot, freshly cooked meal on Friday nights as soon as she arrives in Machias. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)
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Eventually, Jane enrolled in the Army and trained as a paratrooper. She learned to jump out of planes, to disassemble and reassemble M-16s, and served in Desert Storm. After four years, readjusting to civilian life was a struggle, but she found her bearings through long stretches backpacking in the woods of California, Oregon and Washington. Jane re-enrolled in college, got a business degree, then a teaching degree, then a masters in education. She landed a job teaching fourth-graders, “one of the greatest things I ever did in my life.” Twenty-six years passed.
When Jane was eight months pregnant with her son, she and her then-husband moved back to Maine. “I didn’t want to raise my son in California.” The boy is a teenager now. Jane, who works for the Veterans Administration, has been wondering what lies ahead for her. She worries she’s lost her sense of adventure. “I want to remember that girl who just said, ‘Screw it. Let’s go.’
Maybe looking back can help her move forward?
KITCHEN KEEPSAKE
Jane Manchester looks through her mother’s recipes at her home in Topsham. A picture of her mother, Norma, is behind her. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)
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The recipes in the box are mostly written in Jane’s mother’s neat hand. There are ordinary 3-by-5 cards and there are specialized cards with illustrations that variously show flowers, bell peppers, a grinning snowman holding hands with a rabbit, a plump, smiling witch on a broomstick.
On every card, Norma Manchester cited her source. The recipe for Needhams comes from “Dad Watts,” Norma’s father, who made candy every Christmas. The recipe for Rachel’s Casserole — “potatoes and carrots and onions and green peppers and mushroom soup. It’s delicious,” Jane said — comes from Rachel Foss, a close friend of Norma’s. An old-fashioned fruit salad, served with a cooked topping made by combining 1 beaten egg, 1 tablespoon flour, 2 tablespoons sugar and the juice from a can of pineapple, is from Mabel Manchester, who was Norma’s mother-in-law.
Jane Manchester has her late mother’s recipe tin in her Topsham kitchen. Manchester uses Norma’s recipes to cook for her 87-year-old father, Norris, who lives in Machias, where he used to farm. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)
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Other recipes include Rhubarb Custard Pie, Oatmeal Drop Cookies, Cake in a Bowl (cake mix, instant pudding, Cool Whip and candy bars), Molasses Cookies and Microwave Peanut Butter Fudge (“The secret is you must keep stopping your microwave and stirring,” Norma wrote on the card. “Use a wooden spoon also”). Jane says her dad has a “wicked sweet tooth,” which could account for the high percentage of sweets in her mother’s repertoire. Spiced Vinegar, pickles and relishes are also well-represented. “My dad will eat pickles all day long.”
Jane is really just beginning to work her way through the box, and has been slowed by repeat requests from her father. He ran out of whoopie pies recently, so he asked for a bushel the next time, instructing his daughter to bring him a box the size of the blueberry boxes she and her siblings used when raking wild blueberries as youngsters. Other times, he’s sent her home with rotting bananas and requested banana cake. He’s hoping for a taste of his late wife’s biscuits soon, and Jane is working on the no-bake cookies and doughnuts.
“It’s not an epic fail,” she said of her no-bake cookie efforts so far. But they’re not yet her mom’s, either.
RECIPE FOR CONNECTION
Norris Manchester is not the easiest man in the world to please. When Jane began cooking her mom’s recipes, he was “a little judgmental.” He’d tell her that her food wasn’t as good as her mother’s.
“When you’re 87, you don’t have a filter anymore,” Jane said, then reconsidered and added, “We were a farm family. He was not a soft place to land. My mom was a soft place to land. My father said, do something, you did something. When he spoke, you listened. He was not fooling around.”
McCardy, Jane’s younger sister, has, to a lesser extent, encountered the same. She estimates she’s made her dad 20 pumpkin pies, following her mother’s recipe.
“The last one I did wasn’t quite as good as Mom’s,” she says he told her, “but it was very close.”
McCardy lives just 10 minutes from her father. She’s always been the child on hand, helping care for their mom when she was ill, taking her dad to doctors’ appointments and stocking his freezer with her mom’s food, portioned into individual meals of the mild, traditional meat-and-potato dishes that he likes: stew meat and gravy, Italian spaghetti sauce, vegetable soup, chop suey. Jane hopes her project is giving McCardy a little break, too. “Anything helps, of course,” McCardy said.
McCardy’s relationship with her dad is more easygoing than Jane’s. They not only share daily life in Machias but interests like gardening. She thinks Jane’s culinary project is working. Their father looks forward to her visits every month or so, “not that he didn’t look forward before, but he looks a little more forward,” McCardy said. “I do think it’s helped a lot for them.”
Jane Manchester makes room in her refrigerator for the 15 pounds of whoopie pies she made to take to her father in Machias. He recently requested “a bushel” of the cookies. “He has a wicked sweet tooth,” she said. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)
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When Jane recently brought her dad that big bucket of whoopie pies as requested (“15 pounds. I weighed it. 15 pounds of whoopies”), “he had a big old grin on his face.” Everyone who came to his house to visit that weekend had to go take a look and admire his stash.
Through most of his nine decades, Norris Manchester has not been one to wear his heart on his sleeve. “He never said, ‘I love you,’” Jane said. “But he does now. I got him saying it on the phone now.”
NORMA MANCHESTER’S RICE BALLS
The instructions are minimal in many of Norma’s recipes, including this one. Rice balls are the first recipe that Jane Manchester made her father. Simply mix all the ingredients together and bake, Manchester said. With three boys, two girls and a summertime farm crew, Norma Manchester did a lot of cooking. Her mom didn’t necessarily find joy in it, Jane said, but “I think she could do it very quickly and efficiently and it was a task that needed to be done.”
1 lb. hamburg
1 small onion
1 cup min. rice
1 egg
1 Tsp salt
dash pepper
1 can tomato soup
Cook 350℉ 1 hr.
