LAFAYETTE, IN — When Jeff Waldon took over Mary Lou Donuts in 2017, he was familiar with the other local bakeries in town.
But above all the rest, he said he knew one local baker stood out: O’Rears Pastry Shop co-owner Judy Lintner.
“Judy has always been a work horse, and I really respected that,” Waldon said.
After Lintner’s husband and bakery co-owner, Greg, died in the late summer of 2024, Lintner said she made it nearly a year before she decided to close O’Rears and sell the building.
Lintner, who recently turned 65, said she has been settling into retirement, taking on a babysitter role for her granddaughter. But Lintner said she knew community members were missing a few of her seasonal classic O’Rears items.
That desire for keeping tradition alive and giving back to the community created a teaching partnership of sorts, between Lintner and the Mary Lou’s bakers.
A legacy of recipes by memory
O’Rears’ closure created a slight ripple effect on other local businesses, such as Nine Irish Brothers, which contracted with Lintner to bake their signature soda bread. Looking to find a new local bakery for the bread, Waldon said he received a call from Nine Irish Brothers owner Matt Rose, asking whether Mary Lou’s could do it.
Waldon said he was happy to, but he decided to reach out to Lintner. Their conversation made Waldon realize he, as well as his bakery employees, had so much to learn from her decades of experience.
Inviting Lintner to show his employees how she made the Nine Irish soda bread, Waldon said he quickly realized there were a few differences in their operations.
Although Mary Lou’s measures its ingredients by weight, Waldon said his employees found Lintner was used to measuring in smaller quantities, often able to eyeball the ingredients as they were dumped into the mixers.
“When she came in, she had this book that has to be at least 30 years old, and it’s got recipes in there that you can barely read,” Waldon said. “A lot of them are recipes from her bakery she had in Rensselaer, but she carries it all up here.”
“Up here,” Waldon said as he gestures to his head, is where Lintner keeps the methods with which she crafts her baked goods. Although a lot of Mary Lou’s products are still crafted by hand, Waldon’s employees often use larger kitchen tools on various items, such as cream horns or decorated sugar cookies.
But some things, Lintner said, you just can’t automate.
“My processes just aren’t written down. I have a lot of recipes that are just locked away in my head,” Lintner said. “But I’m happy to teach others how to make these things.”
Waldon said he came to understand O’Rears sold several popular items around the holidays, like Lintner’s dinner rolls, Mexican wedding cakes, Florentines and tea cakes. It is important to Lintner for those holiday traditions to live on.
“As long as someone is doing this, making these holiday classics, that’s what’s important to me,” Lintner said. “When we closed O’Rears, I hated to take that away from the community. I’d like to see this live on.”
Teaching a new generation of bakers
Although Lintner isn’t an employee of Mary Lou’s, Waldon said he welcomes her into the bakery to teach his workers.
Mary Lou’s baker Louis Ramirez said he and his co-workers have been eager to learn.
While he was working dough for tomorrow’s cream horns, a process that takes several rounds of folding and rolling the dough to create flaky layers, Ramirez said he began working at Mary Lou’s while he was still in high school. After seven years with the bakery, having the opportunity to work with Lintner is like going to baking school.
“When Judy comes in, she’s able to walk us through her processes, and we’re able to take her methods and translate that into a larger process to meet demands,” Ramirez said. “I think it’s just really great that she’s willing to teach us what she knows, because she’s just a wealth of knowledge.”
Waldon said he welcomes Lintner into the bakery as often as she’d like, working to respect her desire for retirement but also providing her the opportunity to keep the local recipes alive.
Throughout the holidays, Waldon said he plans to sell several of Lintner’s former O’Rears products in the Mary Lou’s bakeries as his workers learn her handed-down recipes.
“When she comes in here, for these 23-, 24-year-olds, it’s like learning from their grandma, and they just pick it right up. But at the same time, it’s like, can you copy an artist?” Waldon said of Lintner’s baking skills. “It’s amazing to watch her in there, but in doing this I want this to be on Judy’s terms.”
Lintner said her terms are based on wanting to keep the O’Rears recipes alive in Lafayette.
“(Lafayette) helped me through so much, including after my husband’s death,” Lintner said. “I just want to give back to this community after it’s poured so much into me, and this is the best way I know how.”
Jillian Ellison is a reporter for the Journal & Courier. She can be reached via email at jellison@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: ‘Spending Time’: After O’Rears closure, Mary Lou’s to bake up classics
Reporting by Jillian Ellison, Lafayette Journal & Courier / Lafayette Journal & Courier
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
