< Back to Oral History project: Patrick County, Virginia Public Baking
< Back to Oral History project: Southern Baking
ORAL HISTORY
Chelsea Raby
Pickle & Ash
Baking and cooking for crowds is familiar work for Chelsea Raby, a baker and co-owner of Patrick County’s fine dining restaurant, Pickle & Ash. She grew up in Appalachia and spent much of her childhood in her uncle’s homestyle cooking diner, before leaving the U.S. to cook for fifty people on a military base overseas. Her time baking at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC, taught her the value of tourism in Appalachia, a lesson she employs by highlighting regional canners and craftspeople in her restaurant’s gift shop today. Under the direction of Raby and her partner, Mitchell Sheppard, the menu of Pickle & Ash is the product of collaborative experimentation with regional flavors paired with their expertise. Baked goods like focaccia are on the menu because the staff liked it, and sweet corn creme brulee is there because it took off with customers. And she does all this with locally milled flour and produce from the homestead she shares with Sheppard. Raby says about baking in Patrick County, “It brings me back and kind of roots me again…it makes me listen to myself and my instincts and how I feel about something. I know baking is a science but for me it’s purely instinct.”
