Many in the Monadnock region will remember when the Kernel Bakery provided wonderful bread and baked goods from a gingerbread-style house on Route 202 across from Noone Falls. Here, baker Robert Koerber lived and worked for over 45 years, where he raised his three boys with his former wife Janet Tyler.
The day before I learned of his passing, I had looked up a recipe for a German cinnamon star cookie that Robert always made at Christmas and that I wanted to recreate for my daughter. Her childhood overlapped with some of the years I worked part time at the bakery, in and around college and graduate school, from 1981 to 1991.
In addition to the cinnamon stars, Robert made many delectable treats at Christmas — each one its own exquisite confection. Almond crescent cookies, mince tarts, German stollen, and small and dense English-style fruit cakes were added to the regular litany of items through the year.
Remarkably, each offering from the Kernel was made by hand by Robert, and everything contained a “mixture of whole wheat and unbleached flour,” as I learned to describe to customers.
His daily output of dozens of baked goods was extraordinary and included croissants, a selection of bread and rolls, donuts, and a variety of Danish pastries, among other specialty items like Eccles cakes, fig bars, date and walnut cookies. His famous almond macaroons were especially popular with his older clientele. He also made cakes to order, and sometimes there were cream puffs and éclairs filled with delectable vanilla custard.
Five days a week, year-round, Robert awoke at two in the morning in a dark and sleeping household and walked through the house kitchen to the bakery to begin his work day. He opened at 7 a.m., closed at 1 p.m. and napped briefly in the afternoons before reopening to catch customers at the end of their workday.
In the bakery’s first decade, Robert hired Francis Lizotte from Jaffrey, who quickly learned to finesse croissant and Danish dough alongside him. Other counter employees who worked there through the years were Laura Campbell — a landscape designer in Peterborough — Debbie Dauphinais, Pam Cheever, and artist Robin Oliver. Alice Groh, a great friend to the Koerbers, worked there in the first few years and went on to co-found a biodynamic farm in Wilton.
There were so many memorable customers. Among them, Walter Pratt from Jaffrey and several of his friends would arrive for coffee and pastries at exactly the same time each day in his restored Model A Ford. Joe Clark of Peterborough drove a cement mixer and also stopped in on weekdays. I recall when the Koerber boys — Jason, Christopher and Jonathan— would sit in the bay window gleefully awaiting his arrival.
Above all, Robert was devoted to his regular customers and always held back their favorite items. He knew that those who spent a few dollars a day — back when coffee and an excellent pastry cost only that — were as important as the larger weekly bread orders from area restaurants and stores. No matter how busy, he would take time to talk to people as they came in the door.
Through long talks in less busy moments of the day, I learned about anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner and more about Robert and Janet’s experiences in England. Before returning to America, they had opened the first Cyrnel Bakery in Forest Row where they both attended Emerson College. They were both like the older brother and sister that I never had.
Artisan bakeries seem to be everywhere now, but back in the day they were a business usually found only in cities and suburbs. When I started working at the Kernel in 1981, pastries and croissants were 35 cents a piece, as was a cup of coffee. I don’t believe either was ever more than $2 in later years. When I asked Robert why he didn’t charge more, having encountered other New England bakery prices, he said, “It’s because people will lose confidence.” As far as I know, they never did.
I got to serve and interact with so many different people from all backgrounds and incomes, all “happy to be there, happy to enter the place,” to borrow from the novelist Carolyn Chute.
There was no better Utopia than to work where people wanted to be and to share ideas or news over good food and coffee. Those kinds of interactions are so sustaining and hard to come by today in our social media world.
A few years after I no longer worked there, my husband and I often brought our boys to the bakery. Our oldest would toddle up to the laden display case and request a “bah-hah” (his word for the bear claw danishes) and Robert let him sit on the stoop between the bakery and the house to eat it. I can still see him in his madras hat and little work boots, nibbling his treat with a big grin on his face. And he always reminded me of watching the Koerber boys when they were little.
In this holiday season, memories of the Kernel Bakery and Robert’s devotion to both his craft and his customers are a special kind of solace. So many of us were fortunate and grateful that he brought great joy to all who experienced the aroma-filled, warm and welcoming bakery.
The baker and the bakery are truly irreplaceable.
Catherine Seiberling Pond lived in the Monadnock region for many years, in both Jaffrey and Hancock. She now lives in Kentucky, where she has been for 17 years.