“People say Nancy is going to hell for her doughnuts,” said David Martin, Nancy’s husband.
The Martins own the Windmill Village, and the small bakery, deli and gift shop bubbled with activity late in the morning on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Dogs howled at the train rumbling alongside U.S. Highway 93, and customers charged in to pick up pumpkin and huckleberry pies.
“I’d almost go through hell for her doughnuts,” Manos said, upon hearing Nancy might get sent there.
Tuesday, though, the doughnuts were nowhere in sight. Acorn squash? Check. Red potatoes? In abundance. Huckleberry muffins? Of course. Garlic bulbs? Fresh out of the ground. Drill bits? Ten for a buck. Pumpkin pies? Nearly everywhere.
But doughnuts? Oh, dear. Oh, the withdrawals.
“They got me addicted to them doughnuts,” Manos said.
Tuesday and Wednesday, doughnuts would not be served, not a one. The days before Thanksgiving, the Windmill Village goes on a doughnut hiatus, and Nancy Martin bakes pies. People like Manos walk away bewildered, their bellies filled not with fresh doughnut warmth but with longing.
“This is going to happen all day long,” David Martin said.
In the kitchen last Tuesday, Nancy Martin made sandwiches and filled pie orders, and recalled how the doughnuts got started. It was because she wanted to cook something different, and riffled through her mother’s recipe box for an idea. There it was, her mom’s recipe for maple bars.
They seemed like a good idea, but the maple bars made trouble. They demanded to look alike and Nancy couldn’t oblige them, so instead, she armed herself with a doughnut cutter and started up the frier. Voila. Doughnuts galore.
“Probably the reason they’re so different is they have mashed potatoes in them,” Nancy said.
In the winter, she fries up four dozen doughnuts Monday through Saturday, and she makes more in the summer. The dough rises twice, becoming doughnuts ready for consumption around 8:30 a.m. Each one costs 75 cents.
On pie days, the two days before Thanksgiving and two days before Christmas when the doughnuts disappear, the customers tend to boss around the boss in their disappointment.
“I’ve been fired many times for not having doughnuts,” Nancy said.
Of course, a proprietor can’t be fired, though she hasn’t always owned her own business. The Martins started the business five years ago and they’ve been in the building on the west side of the highway in Ravalli three of those years. In a former life, Nancy used to travel all over the country working in the steel industry, and her brother has shared his perspective on her doughnut revelry.
“This is what’s on the other side of corporate burnout,” Nancy said.
So it tastes like a little bit of heaven, the other side does?
“Yummy, yummy,” said Chuck Fricke, of Florence. “Yummyyummyyummy
yummy.”
“Just a perfect sweetness in the glaze that’s not too sweet,” said Chelci Bruno, an unlikely fan. “It has kind of a gooey center.”
Bruno didn’t even like doughnuts until she met Nancy’s, but she and her sweetie go back and forth between St. Ignatius and Missoula a lot. The doughnuts ride along until they’re devoured.
Most every day, Keith Kudlock visits the bakery, and there, the Ravalli man makes an observation. Call it the doughnut phenomenon. Simply put: Anyone walking in the door after 11 a.m. ain’t getting one.
“They just got a taste all their own, and that’s all there is to it,” he said.
Reporter Keila Szpaller can be reached at 523-5262 or at keila.szpaller@missoulian.com.
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Al Bisson wrote on Dec 8, 2008 10:22 PM:
Thank you
Al Bisson
Concord N.H.
Enjoying retitrement now "