'Priceless': 97-year-old Latrobe woman's Facebook baking sessions go viral

It started with a live Facebook baking session as a way to connect with some socially distanced friends.

Like a yeast dough left untended, it grew and grew and grew.

Suddenly, Lucy Pollock, a 97-year-old home baker from Latrobe, became a social media sensation.

A couple of weeks ago, Mary Ellen Raneri of Latrobe took up a friend’s suggestion that she share her mother’s baking expertise online.

During the first session, Pollock walked her audience through the steps for making Easter buns, with Raneri as her assistant. That proved so popular that the next week, the pair returned to Facebook to make nut rolls.

On April 5, they’ll be back in the kitchen making wedding ring cookies — but this time, they’ll be on Baking With Lucy, a new Facebook page devoted to Pollock’s culinary skills and pearls of wisdom gathered over a long lifetime.

In a couple of days, the page had more than 5,000 followers, Raneri said. The number continues to climb and now tops 7,000.

“It’s nuts,” she said. “We sit down in the evening with the computer and try to answer everybody. People are even saying, ‘Can I be your manager?’ ”

They’ve heard from newspapers, television stations and long-lost friends and neighbors and connected with people all over the globe, from Argentina to Europe to Australia.

“There was one lady who said she was from Tasmania,” Raneri said. “I thought she was pulling my leg, but she wasn’t. I looked her up online.”

“I’m really honored,” Pollock said. “I never thought that me, at 97, that I’d be in the news.”

‘She’s got the touch’

What makes cooking in the kitchen with Lucy so appealing?

“Remember that feeling you had in the kitchen with your grandma, when she’d hand you a cookie?” Raneri said. “People want a feeling like that right now — a couple of hours in the kitchen having a good time.

“When we’re cooking, I know it just makes me feel normal again,” she said.

The recipes themselves have an element of nostalgia and comfort, Pollock says.

“They’re the old-fashioned recipes you never find anymore,” she said. “My recipes are very precious — to me, they’re priceless.”

Then there’s also the joy of watching a master at work.

“If I bake, she’s right there with me,” Raneri said. “I’m all right, but she’s got the touch. Watching her hands, it’s like an artist working.”

Raneri thinks there might be some kind of generational muscle memory in play, as their ancestors include carpenters and stonemasons.

“With pierogies, she can make the dough and fill them like 1-2-3,” Raneri said.

Practice makes perfect

Raneri said Pollock chose the wedding ring recipe because it doesn’t call for yeast — something that’s been in short supply lately on supermarket shelves. She thought most people would have the ingredients already on hand.

It took some doing to find it in the boxes of recipes that have been stored for so long that the paper tends to crumble when touched, Raneri said.

If the Food Network doesn’t come calling, Pollock and Raneri will keep livestreaming the Sunday cooking lessons on Facebook.

Look for Pollock to make her favorite cinnamon rolls at some point.

“They’re really very simple, and practice makes perfect,” she said.

“We’ll continue for a while, as long as people want to see her,” Raneri said, adding that it’s her husband, Phil, who handles the video chores.

“Phil gets up on the table and films with his phone,” she said. “Now he thinks he’s Cecil B. DeMille.”