REPORTS OF ATWELL MARTIN’S ability to consume enormous quantities of food are persistent, some fanciful. He was also noted for the sincere, yet quaint and humorous, expressions he related to the cook. Those lines would often make an even larger impression than that made by the quan- tity of food he could pack away.

Lib Brunson told Roselle Putney that she and her husband, Wash, were playing cards one evening when Atwell came by. Lib recalled she had “just taken a batch of bread out of the oven and piled the loaves on the far end of the table opposite of where Atwell sat.” She covered the loaves with tow- els to let them cool. Just before bedtime, Lib noticed Atwell was nibbling a piece of bread crust as he played cards with Wash, but thought nothing of it, supposing he had reached under the cloth and broken off a side crust from a loaf, such as sometimes forms on homemade bread.

When Lib arose in the morning, much to her surprise, she found the men playing seven-up and Atwell still nibbling. Lib noted the cloth she had placed over the bread now lay flat on the table’s surface except for a slight rise at one end. Atwell Martin was eating the remains of her last loaf; he had eaten the entire batch of five loaves during the night.

Atwell never confessed to eating the bread, although Lib’s husband fessed up to the truth once his visitor had departed. Roselle Putney remembered Atwell was always polite, thanking her for how she always put up an extra big lunch for him in a pack basket, or when she would offer him a large amount of the soda biscuits she was noted for. Roselle’s gingerbread and suet pudding were among Atwell Martin’s favorites. A small amount of fine-tuning to eliminate the butter and lard in Putney’s gingerbread recipe follows.

The boys prepared supper which was the best ever; then as we ladies, who believe in miracles,

took the children fishing, the men washed the dishes.

Author’s Collection

WHEN ROSELLE PUTNEY of Forestport was cooking for Gideon Perry’s lumber camp in the Little Woodhull country, Atwell Martin was scaling logs one season. He boarded with the men in a frame house at Reed’s Mill. One morning Roselle made hot soda biscuits for breakfast. As the men were going out to their job, Atwell picked up his pack basket lunch, hefted it and said plaintively to Mrs. Putney: “Miss Putney, you ain’t got any of them soda biscuits left have you, to put in for chinking?” Atwell was known to be shy of women. He was never shy when it came to speaking up for food he didn’t have to prepare — especially Mrs. Putney’s baked goods.

Byron-Curtiss felt the same way about both Mrs. Putney’s and Mrs. Brown’s cooking. The Reverend said of the noted area cooks that the women’s home-made ice cream and pies were a great treat to his daughters. “Helen and Catherine were both good cooks in their own right,” he said, “but the meals I took them to at the State House were memorable affairs.”

1931. The beauty of the Adirondacks seen from the head of North Lake. Courtesy Roy E. Wires

(The Emily Mitchell Wires Collection)