Lovin’ in the Oven

Photo by Yuliya Peshkova

Debbie Klauber’s home kitchen looks like it could be in the back of a restaurant. It’s a wide room with copper and stainless-steel countertops, a 10-burner gas stove, two wall ovens, a refrigerator, an antique pantry cabinet, and an 8-by-4-foot butcher block work island in the middle. On a Sunday afternoon with Thanksgiving approaching, there are several freshly baked pies and plates of cookies scattered about. In the middle of the work table sits a large mixing bowl filled with brown sugar, flour and several sticks of butter, soon to be a crumb top for pies.

Aromas of vanilla and spices and pecans and chocolate and savory pie crust permeate the room.

My 12-year-old son Harry has accompanied me on this interview, and has just finished off a slice of baked quiche with vegetables, including grape tomatoes, which are a big favorite of his (“Don’t you love the way they burst in your mouth?” she asks him; he smiles and nods knowingly), and some sort of chocolate coconut cookie. She asks him if he liked the cookie, and he tells her it was really good.

Harry, who wanted to come along but was nervous about meeting new people, is already very much at ease.

Of the cookie recipe, Klauber says, “I just made that up.”

That’s the Debbie Klauber people remember—always making things up, never working from set recipes or measuring ingredients, constantly coming up with new ideas of food to cook—from Debbie’s Kitchen, the much-loved sandwich shop she ran for 25-odd years in Albany’s Center Square neighborhood, first on Lark Street and then around the corner on Madison Avenue. Many of her loyal customers also remember that around the holidays, the piemaking operation seemed almost to overtake the kitchen; sandwich, soup and salad orders were filled, of course, but Debbie and most of her staff appeared to be caught up in frenetic dance, dodging around each other to roll crusts, mix up fillings and get that next batch of pies ready for the oven.

“It was always orchestrated chaos with a touch of samba,” she recalls. “I did love how people would just cram themselves, or I would shove them, into a warm spot, perhaps with a stack of pies, just giving them a bit of elbow room. You must know that as a German girl I am quite industrious, and had really taught my staff how to stay in control and keep the wheels turning. . . . We were all constantly in the middle of things while serving customers. It was a kitchen, there was always something cooking or baking.”

Klauber sold the business a few years ago, bought a house in Belize (on the Caribbean coast east of Guatemala and south of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula), and soon was living a double life: She spends about five months a year in Belize, where she has good friends and does some baking and catering, and spends part of the year in the Capital Region, where she continues to bake pies (especially around the holidays) and picks up occasional catering work.

Here, she lives in a house she bought and renovated in Ravena, a sleepy village 20 minutes from Albany but worlds away from the relative bustle and hipness of Center Square. (She jokes of her Ravena address that she’s in “the witness protection program.”) The spacious kitchen is warm and inviting; you can picture guests gathering comfortably around the room, wine glasses resting on the butcher block table. The design of the space, she confirms, is “both for function of production and for company.”

Wherever she may be on any given day, in her head Klauber is feverishly plotting her next move, which presumably will involve a brand she is developing called Pirate Girl Treats (in Belize, people call her Pirate Girl). She has a logo (using a photo of herself as a little girl), a domain name (pirategirltreats.com, not yet a live website) and all sorts of “wacky, creative ideas” of things she might do with the brand besides simply baking and selling her familiar confections. “I just haven’t completely formulated it yet,” she says.

As someone who long ago realized that a “normal” 9-to-5 job wasn’t for her—“I don’t even have a resume, so I don’t know where I could even apply for work”—Klauber worries that she needs someone to rein in her creative chaos, help her focus on a workable plan for the brand, and get it off the ground.

“If I don’t commit to something soon,” she laughs, “I’ll either go broke or be committed.”

Debbie Klauber was born in Queens and raised there through her high school years. She lost her mother to a cerebral hemorrhage when she was 17; “That’s why I’m so fiercely independent,” she says. Growing up, she wanted to be a marine biologist or a speech therapist. She wasn’t interested in cooking or baking, and didn’t know how, even though, she says, “My grandmother was such a wonderful baker, and she only had one and a half arms.”

(I had pictured her at age 15 baking brownies and pies for her two brothers, their friends, and anyone else who dropped by the home, but that need to nurture with food just wasn’t in her yet.)

She worked in Manhattan for a year, then decided to travel, ending up in California for another year. In 1979, she moved to Albany to reunite with an ex-boyfriend, and moved into his apartment on Lancaster Street near Washington Park. She landed a job waitressing at a restaurant called Jason’s on Hudson Avenue, and fate stepped in.

One night, she says, “The chef put out a ham-and-cheese crepe, and I said, ‘That’s a pancake, it’s not a crepe.’ He pushed it at me and said, ‘Serve this.’ I said, ‘No, my tips count on the food.’ ”

“The next week, the manager said, ‘Why don’t you go into the kitchen and cook?’ I said, ‘I don’t know how to cook.’ She said, ‘I think you do.’ ”

Klauber says she then read the center section of The Joy of Cooking, which had a passage titled, “Know your ingredients.”

“So I read it, and all of a sudden I could make anything.”

Realizing that she had an intuitive ability to cook, but never understanding why, Klauber now calls herself a “savant”: “The second I was put in a kitchen, it was very natural to me that I could cook anything. I don’t know if I know what I’m doing.”

Over the next few years, when she wasn’t traveling in Europe, Klauber cooked at Downtown Johnny’s (where Hill Street Café now is), Justin’s on Lark, and Quintessence on New Scotland Avenue. More and more, her natural ability and creative leadership made her indispensable. “Apparently I knew what I was doing, because every other business I worked in, I became the boss,” she says. “People must have had enough confidence in me.”

Well, almost indispensable. She recalls being fired by Justin’s new owner Joe Palma (not the owner who had hired her). While she can’t recall why she was axed, she does remember walking out in tears and saying, “The quiches are still in the oven.”

“I didn’t want the quiches to burn—I still had that much pride,” she laughs.

Around 1985 or ’86, Klauber opened Debbie’s Kitchen. Apparently she had been talking about wanting to have her own place, but she couldn’t remember. A friend told her she got her dream, and she said, “I did?”

For the next chapter in the Debbie Klauber saga, she envisions something along the lines of a Pirate Girl Treat of the Month Club, with options to join at different levels: “Treats will vary throughout the year, treasure boxes filled, perhaps becoming a buccaneer level buys you the treasure map.” But she stresses that these are just ideas, nothing concrete yet.

People have asked her why she doesn’t write a cookbook, but she insists that she couldn’t do a traditional cookbook—she’d get bored just gathering and writing recipes (which she doesn’t really follow anyway). She says it would be much more fun to write a book of cooking and travel stories, and hasn’t ruled it out.

And while she says she doesn’t really like the direction TV cooking shows have gone in recent years, Klauber, who has done local shows with Benita Zahn and New World chef Ric Orlando, does betray some measure of regret for not getting in on the Food Network phenomenon as it was taking off. “Why Rachael Ray and not you?” friends would ask. And in fact, she was invited to be on the Food Network show Ready . . . Set . . . Cook! twice, but each time another commitment got in the way. One was a catering gig for 300 people; the other was a job baking a wedding cake. “It wasn’t like, ‘Screw those people, I’m going to go on TV,’ ” she says.

And while Klauber is not lacking in ego—she has always been outwardly proud of her work and her ability to make people happy with good food—her decision to put serving people over mass media exposure says a lot about her giving nature.

Her trade secrets? I haven’t gotten many out of her. She did once tell me that she uses vanilla extract in almost everything she bakes. And during a discussion of the one criticism I’ve heard about her signature, multiple-ingredient sandwiches—that they can be hard to eat without the fillings squirting out all over the place—she laughs and says she often had to remind employees the importance of proper sequence in layering sandwich ingredients. Fruit, she says, whether sliced pears or sliced tomatoes, should never be layered right next to the cheese, which creates a near-automatic slip-slide effect.

Ultimately, she wraps up her “big secret” this way: “I think my secret is that it’s still a mystery to me.”

“I think the most important part of living and working,” she says, “is you have a purpose—you give, you get. And with cooking, you get to nourish, nurture, teach, laugh, and even make people cry ( with joy) because something is so good. Which brings you full circle to: You give, you get.”

“I love living, I live a life of love. . . . I give, I get.”

Tagged as: Debbie Klauber, holiday entertaining, pie, pies, Thanksgiving