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ORAL HISTORY
Lydia Faust
Born in 1933, Lydia Mae Faust grew up milking cows, bailing hay, and picking cotton on her family farm outside of Snook, TX. A second-generation American, her lineage can be traced directly to Moravia. Having baked her first cake under her mother’s instruction at age five, Lydia opened the Snook Baking Company in 1968 where she kneaded thousands of kolaches each week for nearly thirty years. Regarded today as one of the Grand Dames of Texas-Czech baking, in 1983 she and a group of women started hosting the Caldwell Kolache Festival the second Saturday of September. She took home the Grand Champion Prize in 2021, and boasts a wall that is heavy with awards and recognitions. Committed to preserving the art of home baking, she has taught classes over the years and is honored to have shared her traditional recipes for plum, apricot, cream cheese, streusel, and poppy seed kolaches in Southern Living. Though Czech was her first language, she confesses that it is harder for her to remember without practice. Yet one phrase she returns to often is, “Bez práce nejsou koláče – Without work, there are no kolaches.”
