Kathleen Welch

By Published On: December 18, 2013

“All Granny’s kids had to cook!” said Kathleen Welch of Pittsboro, who has been cooking most of her life. “If you don’t know how to cook, you’ll never get a grandchild,” her late grandmother, Gracie Pearson, told them.

And if something didn’t turn out well, Granny would say, “It’s o.k. baby, but you need to work on that.”
The first thing Kathleen learned to cook was spaghetti, at age 12. After that was a success, the family named her “the spaghetti girl,” and that was her job.

The next thing she learned to make was fried chicken.
“Me and biscuits didn’t work at first,” she said. “It took about seven years to get biscuits right.”
“I?have played around and messed around with a whole lot of stuff to get the tastes I like,” she said.

She is not big on change, and once she figures out how she likes something to taste, her philosophy is, “If it was good then, it’s still good now.”
Personally, she prefers a smoky flavor to season her vegetables rather than fat back, and it took awhile for her to realize it was the seasoning she didn’t care for, not the vegetables.
“A cook has to have a taste for what she’s cooking–whether it’s something she likes or not,” she said. For instance, she says doesn’t eat boiled okra, but she needs to know how to fix it so someone else will like it.

She comes from a “cooking family” and both of her grandmothers, Pearson and the late Bessie Daniel, and her mother, Rosie Parks, were serious about cooking. They waited to see people enjoy the food they cooked, and Kathleen said she is the same way. She wants people to enjoy what she cooks.
Kathleen worked at Buck’s in Calhoun City  from 1997-2006 where she baked all the cakes and pies, “except the caramel”, she said.

“I didn’t want to try to make the caramel,” she said after watching someone else make them. She baked German chocolate, red velvet, Italian creme, mandarin orange, strawberry, coconut cakes, and buttermilk, sweet potato and chocolate pies.
Since 2007, she has been at Bruce Bait Shop. She prepares breakfast and lunch meals there, and recently decided to add grilled tilapia to the menu.
She uses blackening seasoning and “had to play with it a little bit, but it’s going wonderfully.”

She has also been making some homemade soup and chili. In her soup, she uses chicken and beef with vegetables and a lot of black pepper and chunks of tomato.
Her chili recipe includes ground beef, chili powder to taste, chili seasoning, kidney beans (she likes using them better than chili beans), melted cheese and jalapenos.
Robert Gordon of Bruce loves her chili, saying it’s the “best he’s eaten in his life.”

In 2008, she opened Welch’s Kitchen at her home in Pittsboro, where she’s open for short orders Thursday-Saturday, and she also keeps desserts made.
She always uses fresh, not frozen, ground beef for her hamburgers.?When she makes hamburger steaks, she puts all the seasoning in before she cooks them. She says her husband, Reginald, is a simple, country man – he likes biscuits, gravy, creamed potatoes, meat, greens and cornbread. He also likes pecan pie, and he does a lot of grilling.

She knows she will be frying chicken for the Christmas program at her church, “at least 100 pieces.”
For their family Christmas, she will either make potato salad or mustard and turnip greens, and if she makes dessert, it will be coconut, German chocolate or Welch’s pound cake, which she says resembles a sour cream pound cake.

But at her house, there is always pecan pie and German Chocolate cake for Christmas and Thanksgiving.
In making pecan pie, she started with the recipe on the Karo bottle and played with it a little bit until she got it like she liked it. She uses a smaller amount of filling than usual, with less sugar and more Karo.

And she likes to make her dressing from cornbread that has been frozen. Her gravy recipe includes cream of chicken soup, cream of celery soup, chicken broth, pieces of chicken, and a couple of spoonfuls of the raw dressing.

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